Dashboard App Design

Help the business company build the POS system and create an effective dashboard function to solve our client's problems successfully.

Company

Abacus Business Computer LLC at New York

Platform

Desktop

Time

May 2019 - July 2019
3 Months Project

My Process

User Research
Ideation
Mockups
Usability Testing

My Role

Product Designer

Team Members

2 Data Scientists,
2 Front-end,
2 Product Desigenrs

Team Members

3 Product Designers
2 Product Managers
1 User Researcher

The Challenge

Users cannot keep track of their sales, inventory, and employees

Abacus Business Computer LLC. is a business consultant company in New York City. They are experts in restaurant, salon, and retail with over 20 years of experience and got satisfaction from 5,000 shops. However, their POS system lacks the dashboard function and makes user complaints about it.

The Goal

Create a POS dashboard system to help employers improve sales and monitor employee’s performance

POS system can create reports on how well your team performs, keep a record of how often your employees are on time for work, and keep an eye on the products you’re selling.

Process

01. Interview 6 users to define the user’s pain points and needs

We interviewed 6 Salon store managers and asked them questions like:
• What’s your pain-points when you manage your store?
• What’s your main purpose when you use our system?
• What’s your pain-points when you use our current system?

02. Analyze user journey to find their behaviors and needs

By analyzing the journey map, we organized the scenarios, expectations, and opportunities of users in every step and found that users wasted a lot of time to check employee performance, analyze performance and compare employees.

03. Made competitive analysis to brainstorm the functions

By making competitive analysis, we found that all competitors have common function like: sales performance summary, sales performance analysis and comparison.

04. Built information architecture to sort dashboard elements

In the user interview, we asked users which key indicator are they most concerned. Based on their feedback, we sort out the key elements which needed to be shown in the information architecture.

04. Built POS dashboard style guide

POS system doesn’t have the dashboard function so we need to build the first style guide for it, including typography, color, components, charting, and tables.

UX key metrics:
1. Legibility: Font monospace + Dynamic type
2. Consistency: Brand color blue (means professional and trust)
3. Accessibility: use Contrast Grid to follow W3C 2.0 contrast
4. Intuition: Color-favored card (green means up and red means down)
5. Scalability: 8-point Grid makes no blurry half-pixel offsets on user's different devices.

Solutions

01. Use data visualization to improve the work efficiency of managers.

Users use the table to organize the data by themself, which has low efficiency and wastes them a lot of time. Therefore, we use data visualization to provide the information they need. Users can interact with data visualization for further research.

02. Create Performance Review function for users to check employee's performance concisely.

Through user research, user hopes to see an overall review of the employee’s performance before viewing the details. If the employee’s performance does not match his expectations, he will take the time to look at the details.

03. Use AI to predict employee sales in the future and help managers take actions in advance smartly.

Through user research, user care most about is whether employees can meet the sales expectations this month. Therefore, we use the employee's historical sales data to predict the sales trends in the future and help managers understand sales situation in advance to take corresponding measures.

04. Use table view and data visualization to make managers compare employees more efficiently.

By user research,  we found that users often need to compare employee's performance when they need to promote, lay off or downgrade employees. However, there is no feature to help them compare employee performance. So we made a wireframe to decide what architecture to use to present the comparative function.

Based on user research, we sorted out the employee indicators that users care most about as a comparison factor. They are very concerned about the employee’s performance among employees at the same level. So we use data visualization to make it easy for managers to identify the position of employees at a glance.

05. Hi-Fi Mockups applied the new style guide

We crafted the visuals from scratch and applied the new style guide. This is part of Hi-Fi Mockups.

Reflections

3 Main KPIs to show the impact

• After usability testing, the new design brought a double digit DAU increase.
• Well received by users and stakeholders.
• A selling point for Pos System and helped acquire new customers.