Cuddle Admin: Helping users manage data transactions effectively
Admin module is a backbone of Cuddle application. Using the admin module, the admins can set up client business data in the form of different “Transactions”. Once the client specific transactions with various data sources are set from the admin side, Cuddle is easily accessible to its business users and responds to their natural language based “Ask” questions using interactive charts.
What are transactions?
Transactional data describes the business events or transaction that takes place as an organization conducts its business; e.g. sales orders, invoices, purchase orders, shipments, etc.
1. Discovering Admin pain areas
- Earlier the “Transaction Management”(add/modify/delete) used to take place outside Cuddle through excel based worksheets and using multiple systems. There was a strong need to integrate the Admin module into Cuddle to get the overall visibility of all the client specific transactions at one place, handle related data ingestions and manage them efficiently.
- To create, modify and delete the transactions, import data against the transactions and finally to publish, Admin team had to rely on the Engineering team. The overall process was time consuming and needed collaboration between multiple teams. The users expected admin module to speed up the transaction management process having no dependency on others.
2. Objectives
The analysis of pain areas percolated into following design and development objectives
- Design an intuitive transaction management flow that is “Self-serve” in nature with very low learning curve and zero dependency on others
- Reduce overall time taken to create new transactions and manage old transactions (from 2–3 hours to 15–20 minutes)
3. User Stories
After discovering and validating admin pain areas, we created a set of admin user stories
As a < type of user >, I want < some goal > so that < benefit, value>
4. Transaction Management Flow
This is how a typical transaction flow looks like. From this flow, we also created some quick paper prototypes that was very helpful to communicate ideas with the broader team at the early stages of development.
5. Final Designs
After going through a bunch of iterations, we arrived at the following set of designs that we finally rolled out.
6. How did we measure design success?
One of the major metric for evaluating design success for us was reducing time to add a transaction. This is important because creating 30 to 50 client transactions for admin is quite a frustrating experience and we want to at the bare minimum, reduce the time required to add transaction (even if it includes perceived sense of time required).
New Admin module auto detects and segregates data columns as Attributes and Metrics with various data types (number, string and date) from the uploaded file and saves significant admin user efforts. Users can work on the transaction data structure and ensure it looks correct through “Preview” feature before making it live. We observed that the using the admin module, the average transaction creation time for 10 admin users and 3 live client data transactions was reduced from 2–3 hours to 20 minutes.
If you found this helpful, I’d appreciate if you can give it some shout 👏👏 and share with your friends and colleagues. If you have worked on similar admin flows, I’d love to hear about your experience.
