Redesigning Internal Tooling for Urban Company’s Partner Teams
Often, internal tools are overlooked in terms of visual experience and aesthetics. Think about the HR software, that in-house data tool, or any of the dashboards used by the internal teams in your company. Chances are they look like clunky, boxes stacked randomly. Here’s how we dealt with it.
A Background
While working at Urban Company in 2019, I was part of the Monetisation pod which dealt with strategies related to finance, incomes, taxation, and costs on the Partner side of the Urban Company’s business.
I’ve worked with product managers, engineers, and the business side long enough to observe that the internal tools that they had were quite clunky and required considerable time to get used to. The team and in fact, everyone in the company knew this but we couldn’t prioritize it either due to paucity of time or resources (or sometimes, both).
Since I worked longest with this pod, I had developed quite an empathy for the people who had to spend a great deal of their time on such boring, albeit necessary tools. That's when I asked my manager if we could revamp these tools and do some good karma. We called this project Rich Partner Profile.
What were the problems?
Since the Monet team dealt with problems related to UC Partner performance, showing comprehensive details of partner profiles in one place was important. But at the time, there were challenges like:
- Details of the UC Partner performance like ratings, metrics on repeat customers, delivery, job acceptance, etc. existed in different places across myriad screens in different dashboards, sometimes across SQL queries, and Google Sheets. It was very difficult for anyone to get a snapshot of a partner's performance-related data in one place.
- The data usually available with the internal team had little to no parity with what was shown to the partners on their app. As such it was difficult for internal teams to understand and communicate effectively with partners unless they had been in the system for long enough to know its complexities. This is naturally not a scalable or intelligent way of conducting business.
- Sharing notes on the UC Partner performance between internal teams was also scattered and inefficient. It generally happened over Slack, sometimes over email threads. A lot of knowledge used to get lost in acres of messages.
- For anyone in the team who didn't know where to look for a particular dashboard, it was time-consuming to understand the navigation and one had to wait for the onboarding or education around how to use the tool.
How did we solve this?
Step 1: Understanding Performance Metrics
Before diving into the designing solution, I started with understanding ‘how is a partner performance measures on our platform?’, ‘Who are ideal partners?’ and questions like those. It taught me to understand things from a fundamental level and use first principles to answer.
We had a lot of metrics to measure the Partner Performance across these 3 spectrums. I grouped the metrics in these 3 sections.
Step 2: Research & Analysis
Next, I proceeded to understand how other similar platforms solve this issue. I researched both, Indian and Global businesses, like, AirBnb, Swiggy, Uber, Go Jek, and Grab.
I discussed my findings with the broader team and we found that Uber had designed their driver growth in a fashion that was relatable to Urban Company’s Partners to an extent, in the sense that they catered to a similar demography as ours, and had performance linked levels based on skill, experience, and performance over time.
Step 3: Wireframing, Iterations & Critiques
Over the next couple of days, I aimed the following key tasks for myself:
- A simple information architecture of the partner performance dashboard
- Facilitating communication between the product and the data engineering team to bring all relevant data to one place based on the groupings in design.
- The ability for the internal team members to share their notes, and feedback about the partner on the dashboard itself which was accessible within the organization.
- All the performance targets, historical trends, ratings, and reviews received over time were shown via interactive charts and graphs on this dashboard. It did not need any SQL query or table.
A few of the iterations are shown below.
Step 4: Final Design Handoff
Since the dashboard was a bigger project and the team was picking it up in sprints, I started by handing off widgets for components like tables, graphs, etc as shown below.
The final UI for the Rich Partner Profile looked like this:
What was the impact?
Within a span of 2 weeks, our team made this dashboard live and started receiving lots of feedback. Since this was an internal release, our impact was related more to the qualitative side. A few key pointers in this regard:
- Zero to minimum time spent onboarding new team members on the dashboards.
- I received requests not just from the Partner Support team, but also from Customer Support teams to implement other flows, more features, and functionality on revamped UI.
- More importantly, I was able to get a buy-in from executive stakeholders to have a team work dedicatedly on this project. It proved that good design is indeed, good business.
Credits to the small team who volunteered for this pilot project:
- Engineering — Ujjawal Mishra, Shashank Chaudhary,
- Product — Sachin Gupta (AVP, Monet Pod)
