From Insights to Actions: Research behind building a dashboard
TLDR: At Perkbox we believe that user research is a continuous process that is crucial in defining, validating & testing features and it’s equally important to monitor feedback once a feature is live. This article goes through the different methods of research we implemented for our admin dashboard feature “insights & actions”.
Surveying the landscape
Our project started with a survey campaign sent out to our global customer base, engaging with Product Champions, typically HR professionals. The survey was shared with organisations of varying sizes and across different industries, and with different engagement levels with Perkbox.
The survey was sent to over one thousand individuals and dived into their current usage of reporting and what value they got from the metrics.
We were also able to unravel what mattered the most for our admins and how they perceived good ROI. Our findings were as follows:
Engagement: This was mentioned by multiple people as a crucial metric. Understanding employee engagement, overall engagement with the platform, and engagement by different teams were commonly emphasised.
Savings: The concept of savings was mentioned by several respondents. This includes measuring the value and benefits of the platform, tracking colleague savings, and calculating the ROI.
Usage and Utilisation: Monitoring usage and utilisation of the platform was also highlighted by multiple individuals. This includes tracking active users, perk redemption, utilisation of specific hubs, and activation by new starters.
Unveiling Insights, Interviews as guiding metrics
A series of interviews with admins proved to be enlightening windows into their day-to-day tasks. A fascinating revelation emerged — these admins were diligently performing numerous manual tasks to boost employee engagement. This included tasks such as shouting about certain perks via email, Intranet or even Slack, creating a recognition chain to boost morale and even sharing with their teams how much they’ve saved in total as a company.
Armed with this new discovery, we embarked on a journey to merge the insights that are revealed through reporting with these actions that help improve engagement. Ultimately simplifying workflows for admins that may have been less motivated to engage and saving them time.
User Testing
With our new knowledge, we navigated towards user testing — a critical juncture where theory transitions into practicality. We carried out 1:1 interviews with admins from different-sized companies with various engagement rates via Zoom over two weeks.
Armed with an interactive prototype, admins were asked to explore the new dashboard as they wished. This allowed us to observe which widgets and actions stood out to them the most. We then asked questions about their perception of the data and actions that we provided as well as what stood out to them the most and why.
The user testing phase was not only a validation of our design choices but also a springboard for iterative enhancements.
We found that the admins really liked the widget approach and mostly always noticed the ‘Cost of Living’ widget first.
The unlock £9,855 call to action caught admins attention and enticed them to click on it which was our goal. Admins generally had a positive impression on the actions that were shown to them upon clicking on this call to action and said that they would be interested in carrying out at least one action from the recommendations.
Launch & Follow up
Once we launched the feature we closely monitored feedback through our customer-facing teams. Recently, we discovered an interesting contrast: during testing, the ‘Unlock £X’ CTA received positive feedback, but in real-world use, many admins hesitated to click on it, fearing they would be charged that amount.
This highlights a crucial point — no matter how thorough the testing, you can never fully predict how users will interact with a product until it’s live and they’re engaging with it using real data. This underscores the importance of staying connected to a feature post-launch and diligently tracking how it is received by users.
To summarise, the journey of building Insights & Actions at Perkbox has demonstrated the importance of continuous user research and feedback. From initial surveys to post-launch monitoring, each phase provided valuable insights that shaped the feature and guided us in refining the experience. This process has reinforced our commitment to iterative improvement, ensuring we continue to build features that truly meet our users' needs.
