Designing Complex Dashboard for Multiple User Expertise
Business models has been growing so much in the last decade, in line with the growth of the technology. Even in some businesses, technology become a primary part to run that business, for example SaaS, mobile apps, or even web hosting provider, like Niagahoster.
We have been growing a lot since our first service release in 2014. At that time, we only have one service, that called Shared Hosting service (that now have changed into Unlimited Hosting) which is targeting web developer as our main target market. At that time, the demand of the website was not as high as the mean time.
8 years later, I could say that website nowadays already becoming one of the primary needs of majority segments of businesses to run. As the market evolve, Niagahoster also evolving in line with the market needs. From just 1 kind of service, 8 years later we have 10 main services, from web hosting, even the private servers, not including the partnership programs.
And with this kind of evolution, each products have the unique kind of target markets. Not just each products, even just one product may having multiple kind of personas. From the experts, to the newbies. From the teenagers, to the oldies. And somehow, for us, the design team, this could be a real challenge to overcome, especially when designing user dashboard. The user dashboard itself could be as relatable as possible to the users, and somehow we need to make a best dashboard design for the multiple type of users.
How could we build the best user dashboard experience for the experts and newbies in the same time?
And here is what we do to overcome that kind of challenge, especially when designing user dashboard:
Do a lot of user research
Of course, who doesn’t know that? How could we design for a users if we don’t really know who we’re designing for, right?
As a designers, have a deep knowledge of the users is a must. And in the product with multiple kind of persona is not a different case. We need to know the product’s POV from all kind of those personas. This kind of data will fasten the design process and the clarity of our design goals and purpose.
The good news is in Niagahoster design team, we have a dedicated research team. And they always gives us new insights about our users for us to make a relatable product for our users.
What kind of research methods and deliverables that we usually needs to do that?
- Personas — To know who exactly used our product and the deeper profile of them. So we could know their profiles, goals, motivations, and pain points. And if the product itself having multiple kind of personas, we could really compare those kind of information between each kind of personas.
- Journey map of each personas — Sometimes each personas having a different kind of journey, and even different goals. We need to breakdown the differences and the likeliness of the journeys and the goals between them.
Deepened the product knowledge
After knowing about the users, the second things we need to know is the knowledge about the product itself. Product knowledge also gives us a glimpse of information about how our users using the product by connecting between the product and the users data for previous phase.
And this one will be the next challenge for us if the product is advanced enough for our current state of knowledge. For example: We need to do enhancements on the private server dashboard, but we didn’t even having a single knowledge of the server itself because no one of us was coming from IT college. And that kind of things not just happened once or twice, since a lot of our users having more product or service expertise than all of us.
So how can we overcome this challenge?
- Read a lot of product documentations
- Try the product by ourselves
- Try competitors’ products
And this one is the tips that we always do beside doing the points above. We could really gather the user insights and product knowledge at the same time by using Initial Usability Test.
We learn about the users, and in the same time we could learn how to use the product from the users too. But, the most important is we need to have a basic knowledge of the product first before conduct the Test, or using the data from Journey Maps, to make the relatable scenarios for the Test.
We usually used data from the personas to determine the participants criteria that could represent the users of the product. So we could compare the data based on each personas in the next phase.
Analyze and compare the data
Bunch of insights is nothing if we couldn’t analyze it. So right after getting users data and product behavioral data, we could analyze the data from the sources above and compare the data based on the personas.
So what kind of data that could we used as the insights for the design phase?
- The main goals on all personas — Since this was a goal, this feature or information should be really visible for all type of users, whether there were behavioral differences or not.
- The likeliness of behaviors on all personas — We could say that this kind of insights are the most important things to do for all of the personas. Or we could say that this is the general feature that should be easily reachable for all type of users.
- The differences of behaviors between all personas — The experts and the newbies have a distinct differences in how far their knowledge of the product. So the amount of information that can be captured in a screen could be different, and this can make a behavioral differences between all type of users. With this data, we could rearrange and reprioritize the information on the screen that harmless for the newbies but still useful for the experts.
Prioritize features or information
Before designing, it would be a lot better if we prioritize the information that contained inside the dashboard. As Morgane Peng has said in her article about UX Efficiency Frontier, users with high level of expertise needs more information inside their dashboard, so they prefer in more complex kind of dashboard. But as the users with lower level said otherwise, we should make this dashboard balanced. Useful and complex enough for the experts, but harmless and guiding for the newbies.
This is our formula of information prioritization:
- Access towards user main goals — This kind of information should be in high level of visibility. Sometimes expert users and the newbies have a different main goals. In that situation, we must facilitate both of their goals in the highest level of visibility, so both kind of users can accomplish their goals easily even if they have a different main goals.
- General information — This is the information that needed by all type of the users, but the urgency level is lower than the main goals, or sometimes not directly related to users’ main goals. For example: service details, expiry date, system status, etc.
- Basic settings / features (if any)— If the service is complex enough, at the first stage of the design phase, we should determine which are the basic needs and advanced settings, so we could separate them. The purpose of this separation is to deliver the main value generally to all kind of users, but still keeping the complex function accessible for the experts.
- Advanced settings / features (if any) — Still the same context with the point above, the advanced settings or feature should be still accessible for the experts. The other purpose of this section is to slowly educate the newbie users, so they could get more values from the product. To achieve the second purpose, we usually put some little descriptions or tooltips, so new newbie users still could get the context of this advanced functions.
- Trivial functions — Aside from the main functions that gives the main product value to the users, sometimes the team wants to put some other feature that slightly related from the product and could be adding more values to the product. So the users could explore another functions that could adding the values and benefits that the products or company could offer for them. The example for this trivial function are the tutorial section, upsell or cross-sell offerings, loyalty programs, etc.
To make it clear enough, I will demonstrate this prioritization in our current project.
Conclusion
Designing for multiple personas is a big challenge and tricky for every designers. That’s why to accomplish that challenge we need to gather a lot of data related to the product, such as the detailed personas profile, journey maps of each kind of personas, and even the behavioral data.
To make the design more relatable, we as a designers also need to deepened our knowledge of the product, so we could combine the users’ data and the product itself to create better product experience. And from that data, we could prioritize the information that needs to be seen by the users, so all kind of users can get the best product experience.
Post-read notes
Thank you for reading this article, and I do really hope this article helps. And I know, this article is not deep enough. So I hope that I could deepened the explanations of each steps in the next article. Stay tune on Niagahoster Product Story!
