Designing the new “Poool Dashboard”
💥 This has been an extremely eventful month. First of all the new and improved version of Poool dashboard has been launched which is more intuitive, more powerful, more consistent more. . . Secondly this month marks my 1-year anniversary as Head of Design at Poool 😊🎉. So what better way to celebrate it than by sharing with you the design process of our star product, Poool’s new dashboard, a product which we are really proud of 🙌.
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For those who don’t know Poool 🙈
Poool is a startup that facilitates financing and access to digital contents. Our main product is a dynamic paywall which allows digital media companies, mostly on-line newspapers, to maximize the value of their audience by means of effective compensation choices. Our solution is made up of two digital tools: The dashboard and widgets.
We are going to center our attention on the design process of Poool’s new
dashboard, a tool used by technical and marketing teams of digital newspapers to effectively drive their digital monetization strategies.
But before we start 👇
In the digital industry, the dashboard has become a key and fundamental tool to monitor business, therefore:
A dashboard is a super powerful marketing tool that allows organizations to have a global vision of what is happening in order to make better business decisions as well as
to optimize their strategies.
Designing a dashboard requires special care especially when it puts business
decisions on the line. When we design a dashboard we have to take into
consideration different disciplines and a wide range of factors.
- Key performance indicators (KPI’s) that allow us to make good business decisions.
- Usability and UX to guarantee that there is an optimal experience and that the users are able to achieve all necessary tasks in a dashboard.
- Engineering in order to build this super tool and to optimize data
performance. - Data science to understand, conceptualize and analyze data.
- Data visualization to graphically represent all the information and data in a way that it can be easily contextualized, compared and understood…
Dashboards are complex tools and these factors and disciplines can vary according to each company’s organization and objectives. In our case, Poool’s dashboard helps us follow up the fulfillment of our business objectives and optimize our own business strategy. For our clients, Poool’s dashboard is a vital tool which helps our customers drive their digital content monetization strategies. With Poool’s dashboard our users can: create customer journeys adhering to their digital strategies, segment their audiences, configure widgets, carry out A/B tests, collect data and of course, view the metrics in order to make the convenient business decisions👊🏻…
. . . The latest version of Poool’s Dashboard 🔥
With the arrival of new needs from both our clients and our market niche, we had to add new features to our dashboard as well as new products that will be out soon 😋. So, we urgently needed to redesign our dashboard that permitted all these improvements and evolutions.
The redesign of a startup’s principal product has a great impact in different areas, one of which is of course, in its corporate vision. For this reason, it is important that the whole team should be involved in the design process. Along with my co-worker Yuna Orsini, Head of UX at Poool, we decided to organize a 2 day collaborative design workshop to determine all the points concerning the redesign of Poool’s dashboard with the team. Our key to overcome this challenge was:
Using a Design Thinking approach and working with a team in which many disciplines converge.
Adopting the Design Thinking methodology helped us and still is helping us focus on our business objectives, but also on our final users in a more accurate way by understanding their needs better, detecting problems more efficiently, defining design challenges and finally, finding better solutions 💪.
Team Poool in action! 🙏
Once we determined when we were going to have our collaborative design session, the team save 2 days holding off on other appointments in order to be able to participate in these workshops without any interruption. Before this, my co-worker Yuna and I had to meet up to plan these 2 collaborative design days.
- We prepared and sent surveys to the team in order to find out what each team member’s worries, problems and expectations were regarding the product. The survey was sent before the collaborative design session and gave us needed insights in order to be able to choose the appropriate workshops in accordance to our colleagues’ issues.
- Workshop preparation where we would choose the most adequate workshops which were determined by the insights given and our own intuitions, seeing how we undoubtedly had a perception of the existing problems considering we were already part of the product team. The main goal of these workshops was to DEFINE THE PROBLEM that we must face and to FIND SOLUTION(S) to that problem.
- Planning for the days of the sessions, creating the framework and preparing materials (post-its, paper, pencils, markers, stickers etc. . .) planning the catering and of course we need to plan some team building workshops 😉.
Once the day came, and during these 2 days, nothing went as planned… It went much better! Despite all the disagreements, the feeling of being blocked, the emotions running high and the extreme exhaustion, this collaborative session was successful and we were able to create a new dashboard more efficiently.
The following disciplines played part in the workshop: engineering, visual design, UX design, marketing, communication, strategy and sales.
We are going to take a look at how a 5 stage design process was developed in the creation of Poool’s new dashboard beginning with this collaborative design workshop.
🔑 1- Determining and defining the problem
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