Simplifying Complexity: Enhancing Expedock's Dashboards
Summary
Background
Problem
Audit
Design
Results
Next Steps
Key Takeaways
Summary
GOAL
To enhance the usability of Expedock’s dashboard product
YEAR (DURATION)
2023 (1 month)
ROLE
Discovery, Visual Design, Interaction Design, Content Strategy, Testing
IMPACT
Enabled Account Executives (AEs) to construct a more cohesive and seamless sales narrative and demonstration.
Increased forwarder engagement rate
Background
Expedock helps forwarders process freight documents, extract important information, and surface shipment insights in our Freight Business Intelligence tool.
The goal of this tool has been to support forwarders who don't have the resources to build an in-house tool. With Expedock, they can easily track their business performance without investing heavily on tech.
As we onboard forwarders, Expedock continuously adds new dashboards tailored to meet various needs within the freight forwarding industry:
The accounting team needs to surface invoices that need to be paid right away so containers get released. They also need to know which invoices should be billed and collected to maintain a healthy cashflow.
Operations managers need to look at how efficient their team is in entering freight information.
Sales and account managers need to see the performance of their accounts so they can meet sales targets and contribute to the company’s overall revenue.
Branch managers and executives need to look at a high level view of revenue, expenses, profit and other KPIs so they can monitor how the business is performing and identify what is driving their growth so they can double down on that.
The impact of building a complex product for multiple use cases
The continuous addition of dashboards and visualizations to the Freight BI tool has led to its complexity and navigation challenges. Following the onboarding process and training of new forwarders' main users, we observed infrequent platform usage, typically limited to once a week or every two weeks, leading to eventual churn from our BI tool.
Feedback from forwarders has highlighted the overwhelming number of dashboards and the time required to navigate through them, with some users expressing difficulty in locating specific dashboards.
Although this wasn’t part of the pipeline and there were other features to build, I felt compelled to explore these issues.
Auditing the current tool
Upon analyzing the web tool, I immediately identified areas for optimization to enhance ease of use and reduce cognitive load.
Currently, the user encounters two different navigational sections upon logging in: one at the top and another as a sidebar. This setup creates a zigzag pattern when navigating the page, adding complexity to dashboard navigation.
Discoverability of dashboards poses another challenge. Depending on the user’s permissions, they may need to explore around 30 pages or dashboards. Upon logging in, users must recall the location of specific dashboards, leading to a cumbersome process of opening multiple tabs to find the desired one.
Furthermore, when users drill down from a specific chart on a dashboard, there is no visual indication of their navigation path. The absence of a back button requires users to remember the previous page or dashboard.
Fixing navigational and discoverability issues
In terms of navigation, I started ideating on what’s the best implementation to simplify the navigation. I decided to work on moving everything to a sidebar. Each tab functions as an accordion which houses the related pages or dashboards. This allows the user to just look at one thing and start from left to right.
I also introduced a breadcrumbs functionality. This component shows up when a user enters a page or drills down from a specific chart. The previous page’s breadcrumb pill is clickable and serves as a back button.
To aid discoverability, I had several ideas like adding a pin dashboard functionality, or surfacing the most recently viewed dashboards. However, because we didn’t have much engineering bandwidth, I decided to go with adding a search functionality that is accessible on the sidebar. That way, users can look for the specific dashboard they need right away.
Results
After launching this redesign, the Product team received praises from the Sales team. This allowed our Account Executives to have a smoother demo/storytelling experience. With the new navigation, they can present each use case of the customer, how the customer would access and analyze a dashboard, and how they would drill down from these dashboards.
Within three months of launching, we also observed improvements in our weekly engagement rates on the BI tool.
As a designer, this project enabled me to underscore the importance of investing in usability enhancements throughout the organization.
Next steps
Monitor how users navigate and search in the BI tool.
Identify and prioritize the most critical issues to fix and ideate on possible solutions.
Document and create a backlog of usability issues found in the BI tool so Engineering can pick up some of these issues during cooldown sprints.
Key takeaways
Trust your intuition as a designer.
Recognizing that the initial design wasn't meeting user needs, I took proactive steps to address the issues by auditing the tool and identifying areas for improvement. Even though this wasn’t part of the roadmap, I surfaced it to our PM and highlighted the impact of not solving these issues. This proactive experience paid off as I received praises both from our Chief Product Officer and Sales team.
Balance feature building with usability assessment
While adding new features and dashboards can enhance the functionality of a product, it's crucial to maintain usability and avoid overwhelming users. This project demonstrated the need to balance feature development with ensuring a user-friendly experience.
Simplifying Complexity: Enhancing Expedock's Dashboards
Summary
Background
Problem
Audit
Design
Results
Next Steps
Key Takeaways
Summary
GOAL
To enhance the usability of Expedock’s dashboard product
YEAR (DURATION)
2023 (1 month)
ROLE
Discovery, Visual Design, Interaction Design, Content Strategy, Testing
IMPACT
Enabled Account Executives (AEs) to construct a more cohesive and seamless sales narrative and demonstration.
Increased forwarder engagement rate
Background
Expedock helps forwarders process freight documents, extract important information, and surface shipment insights in our Freight Business Intelligence tool.
The goal of this tool has been to support forwarders who don't have the resources to build an in-house tool. With Expedock, they can easily track their business performance without investing heavily on tech.
As we onboard forwarders, Expedock continuously adds new dashboards tailored to meet various needs within the freight forwarding industry:
The accounting team needs to surface invoices that need to be paid right away so containers get released. They also need to know which invoices should be billed and collected to maintain a healthy cashflow.
Operations managers need to look at how efficient their team is in entering freight information.
Sales and account managers need to see the performance of their accounts so they can meet sales targets and contribute to the company’s overall revenue.
Branch managers and executives need to look at a high level view of revenue, expenses, profit and other KPIs so they can monitor how the business is performing and identify what is driving their growth so they can double down on that.
The impact of building a complex product for multiple use cases
The continuous addition of dashboards and visualizations to the Freight BI tool has led to its complexity and navigation challenges. Following the onboarding process and training of new forwarders' main users, we observed infrequent platform usage, typically limited to once a week or every two weeks, leading to eventual churn from our BI tool.
Feedback from forwarders has highlighted the overwhelming number of dashboards and the time required to navigate through them, with some users expressing difficulty in locating specific dashboards.
Although this wasn’t part of the pipeline and there were other features to build, I felt compelled to explore these issues.
Auditing the current tool
Upon analyzing the web tool, I immediately identified areas for optimization to enhance ease of use and reduce cognitive load.
Currently, the user encounters two different navigational sections upon logging in: one at the top and another as a sidebar. This setup creates a zigzag pattern when navigating the page, adding complexity to dashboard navigation.
Discoverability of dashboards poses another challenge. Depending on the user’s permissions, they may need to explore around 30 pages or dashboards. Upon logging in, users must recall the location of specific dashboards, leading to a cumbersome process of opening multiple tabs to find the desired one.
Furthermore, when users drill down from a specific chart on a dashboard, there is no visual indication of their navigation path. The absence of a back button requires users to remember the previous page or dashboard.
Fixing navigational and discoverability issues
In terms of navigation, I started ideating on what’s the best implementation to simplify the navigation. I decided to work on moving everything to a sidebar. Each tab functions as an accordion which houses the related pages or dashboards. This allows the user to just look at one thing and start from left to right.
I also introduced a breadcrumbs functionality. This component shows up when a user enters a page or drills down from a specific chart. The previous page’s breadcrumb pill is clickable and serves as a back button.
To aid discoverability, I had several ideas like adding a pin dashboard functionality, or surfacing the most recently viewed dashboards. However, because we didn’t have much engineering bandwidth, I decided to go with adding a search functionality that is accessible on the sidebar. That way, users can look for the specific dashboard they need right away.
Results
After launching this redesign, the Product team received praises from the Sales team. This allowed our Account Executives to have a smoother demo/storytelling experience. With the new navigation, they can present each use case of the customer, how the customer would access and analyze a dashboard, and how they would drill down from these dashboards.
Within three months of launching, we also observed improvements in our weekly engagement rates on the BI tool.
As a designer, this project enabled me to underscore the importance of investing in usability enhancements throughout the organization.
Next steps
Monitor how users navigate and search in the BI tool.
Identify and prioritize the most critical issues to fix and ideate on possible solutions.
Document and create a backlog of usability issues found in the BI tool so Engineering can pick up some of these issues during cooldown sprints.
Key takeaways
Trust your intuition as a designer.
Recognizing that the initial design wasn't meeting user needs, I took proactive steps to address the issues by auditing the tool and identifying areas for improvement. Even though this wasn’t part of the roadmap, I surfaced it to our PM and highlighted the impact of not solving these issues. This proactive experience paid off as I received praises both from our Chief Product Officer and Sales team.
Balance feature building with usability assessment
While adding new features and dashboards can enhance the functionality of a product, it's crucial to maintain usability and avoid overwhelming users. This project demonstrated the need to balance feature development with ensuring a user-friendly experience.
Simplifying Complexity: Enhancing Expedock's Dashboards
Summary
Background
Problem
Audit
Design
Results
Next Steps
Key Takeaways
Summary
GOAL
To enhance the usability of Expedock’s dashboard product
YEAR (DURATION)
2023 (1 month)
ROLE
Discovery, Visual Design, Interaction Design, Content Strategy, Testing
IMPACT
Enabled Account Executives (AEs) to construct a more cohesive and seamless sales narrative and demonstration.
Increased forwarder engagement rate
Background
Expedock helps forwarders process freight documents, extract important information, and surface shipment insights in our Freight Business Intelligence tool.
The goal of this tool has been to support forwarders who don't have the resources to build an in-house tool. With Expedock, they can easily track their business performance without investing heavily on tech.
As we onboard forwarders, Expedock continuously adds new dashboards tailored to meet various needs within the freight forwarding industry:
The accounting team needs to surface invoices that need to be paid right away so containers get released. They also need to know which invoices should be billed and collected to maintain a healthy cashflow.
Operations managers need to look at how efficient their team is in entering freight information.
Sales and account managers need to see the performance of their accounts so they can meet sales targets and contribute to the company’s overall revenue.
Branch managers and executives need to look at a high level view of revenue, expenses, profit and other KPIs so they can monitor how the business is performing and identify what is driving their growth so they can double down on that.
The impact of building a complex product for multiple use cases
The continuous addition of dashboards and visualizations to the Freight BI tool has led to its complexity and navigation challenges. Following the onboarding process and training of new forwarders' main users, we observed infrequent platform usage, typically limited to once a week or every two weeks, leading to eventual churn from our BI tool.
Feedback from forwarders has highlighted the overwhelming number of dashboards and the time required to navigate through them, with some users expressing difficulty in locating specific dashboards.
Although this wasn’t part of the pipeline and there were other features to build, I felt compelled to explore these issues.
Auditing the current tool
Upon analyzing the web tool, I immediately identified areas for optimization to enhance ease of use and reduce cognitive load.
Currently, the user encounters two different navigational sections upon logging in: one at the top and another as a sidebar. This setup creates a zigzag pattern when navigating the page, adding complexity to dashboard navigation.
Discoverability of dashboards poses another challenge. Depending on the user’s permissions, they may need to explore around 30 pages or dashboards. Upon logging in, users must recall the location of specific dashboards, leading to a cumbersome process of opening multiple tabs to find the desired one.
Furthermore, when users drill down from a specific chart on a dashboard, there is no visual indication of their navigation path. The absence of a back button requires users to remember the previous page or dashboard.
Fixing navigational and discoverability issues
In terms of navigation, I started ideating on what’s the best implementation to simplify the navigation. I decided to work on moving everything to a sidebar. Each tab functions as an accordion which houses the related pages or dashboards. This allows the user to just look at one thing and start from left to right.
I also introduced a breadcrumbs functionality. This component shows up when a user enters a page or drills down from a specific chart. The previous page’s breadcrumb pill is clickable and serves as a back button.
To aid discoverability, I had several ideas like adding a pin dashboard functionality, or surfacing the most recently viewed dashboards. However, because we didn’t have much engineering bandwidth, I decided to go with adding a search functionality that is accessible on the sidebar. That way, users can look for the specific dashboard they need right away.
Results
After launching this redesign, the Product team received praises from the Sales team. This allowed our Account Executives to have a smoother demo/storytelling experience. With the new navigation, they can present each use case of the customer, how the customer would access and analyze a dashboard, and how they would drill down from these dashboards.
Within three months of launching, we also observed improvements in our weekly engagement rates on the BI tool.
As a designer, this project enabled me to underscore the importance of investing in usability enhancements throughout the organization.
Next steps
Monitor how users navigate and search in the BI tool.
Identify and prioritize the most critical issues to fix and ideate on possible solutions.
Document and create a backlog of usability issues found in the BI tool so Engineering can pick up some of these issues during cooldown sprints.
Key takeaways
Trust your intuition as a designer.
Recognizing that the initial design wasn't meeting user needs, I took proactive steps to address the issues by auditing the tool and identifying areas for improvement. Even though this wasn’t part of the roadmap, I surfaced it to our PM and highlighted the impact of not solving these issues. This proactive experience paid off as I received praises both from our Chief Product Officer and Sales team.
Balance feature building with usability assessment
While adding new features and dashboards can enhance the functionality of a product, it's crucial to maintain usability and avoid overwhelming users. This project demonstrated the need to balance feature development with ensuring a user-friendly experience.
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© 2024. Designed and developed by Laura Ang
© 2024. Designed and developed by Laura Ang
