Dashboard experience design

This is a project I was the lead designer while at Accela. Accela is a goverment software company with a quickly growing portfolio of local and federal goverment software suites. Some of the their solutions include; fish and game licensing, contractor licensing, permit issuance, and open-government data resources. This project is for an oipen-data portal built to address the open-gov initiative where users can collect data about their city, state and federal government.

Problem

There was very little research and information collected to identify the end-user and their needs. It was also built on a platform called CKAN that was no longer being supported. It had been built with little to no documentation. The bounce rate was nearly 90% and user retantion at all time low. Basically, no one was using it because it was next to impossible to navigate and use.

Flow diagrams

In order to capture the current state of the platform, I use flow diagrams so I can view the various flows at a high level and track changes down the line. As I create the diagrams, I highlight features that are broken as well as note opportunities for improvement. I also record the information architecture simultaniously (not shown here). The IA document is a text based file where I use tabs for nested features, dashes for static content, and bullets for interactive features/elements.

Feature sets

In order to understand what was currently in place, I scrubbed both the end-user site as well as the admin site to record the current state. I broke them down into three categories; Find, Manage, and Publish.

Proto personas

Since we did not have any research I developed proto-personas based on the features and functionality. The three proto-personas directly reflect the categories since they were based on the perceived intended user per feature.

Proto-persona’s are based on assumptions, not research and later validate when data becomes available.

Solution

User interviews

We didn’t have a contact list so I worked with development to compile a list of registered user emails. I used Google Forms to create a survey with built-in dependencies to identify which category each participant belonged to, in addition to identifying other categories. The survey was also geared towards identifying level of competency and feature value. At the end we asked for their participation with a follow up interview session and future usability studies.

Success! We have data to inform our personas, features and information architecture.

Information architecture

Below is one of many diagrams used to record existing flows for the admin portal. Even though I was only assigned revamping the portal for Citizens and Developers, I kept running into dependencies between the admin portal and the front-end portal, so I scrubbed the admin portal to understand those dependencies and move forward accordingly.

Wireframes

Regardless of responsive design not being a requirement, I feel it is important to establish some responsive-ness springboard whenever designing for the web. This also helps with structuring the IA. Plus, it only doesn't take much time...until it becomes a project requirement. But if/when it does, I will be prepared.