Do you routinely use your analytics dashboard to make strategic and tactical decisions about your website?
No? It might be time for a dashboard redesign.
Create a platform for meaningful, actionable insights
Over the next few weeks, I’ll break down how to reimagine your current dashboard to enable more meaningful, actionable insights.
Step 1: Benchmark your current dashboard’s effectiveness
Just like your website, you’ll want to measure the performance of your dashboard — now and later. How many people used the old version, how many use the new one? Are more people attaining significant value from the new version than the previous one?
Step 2: Conduct stakeholder interviews
Interview each dashboard stakeholder separately to understand how they make decisions today about improving website performance, what information they use, and what information they wish they had.
Step 3: Categorize interview findings
Identify and categorize all findings by theme. Include requirements that fall outside of data, such as communication needs and process changes.
Step 4: Prioritize findings into requirements
Lead a workshop with stakeholders to communicate all of the findings, and then prioritize them. These will become the requirements for your new dashboard.
Step 5: Understand your sales funnel, for real
Understand exactly what your customers are doing and how they think at each stage of your sales funnel. Create a detailed flow chart to visualize their journey. (This one can be done anytime, but sooner is better than later.)
Step 6: Map your site to your sales funnel
Map each page of your website (or interaction) to each stage of your sales funnel. This map will come in handy when it comes time to retagging or editing tags on the site.
Step 7: Set actionable goals
Create realistic, actionable goals for each area of the website you want to improve. However, make sure goals don’t undermine the customer experience (e.g., eliminate or hide communication channels because some perform better than others).
Step 8: Prototype dashboard
Develop a new dashboard based on the requirements, and then iterate, iterate, iterate until it meets the needs of its target users.
Step 9: Roll-out + communicate new dashboard
“Collecting data is only the first step toward wisdom, but sharing data is the first step toward community.” – Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Apply UX thinking to your dashboard
The principles of UX can be applied to anything. When you treat stakeholders of the dashboard like customers and view the dashboard like a product, you quickly realize this redesign process is just like any other UX project.
UX doesn’t just apply to websites. UX is everywhere.
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- Redesigning Your Analytics Dashboard: Categorize Dashboard Interview Findings into Themes
