What began as a simple plan to develop some user dashboards in the Proliant software suite, quickly accelerated into considering an entirely new reality of how a user could go about his/her/their day during work. A process of collorative iteration took place over a span of a few months, with the goal of bringing the tasks to the user in a way that no cumulative HCM software suite had been able to.
This project was going to touch every product in the Proliant software portfolio. And this meant a plethora of different user needs, and opinions of what these dashboards needed to deliver to be effective. So we kicked off a stakeholder engagement process that would last throughout the design process. The initial goal was to dig as deeply as we could to find every single concern that we could help address, every minute we could save by streamlining processes, and every nugget of joy we could provide to our users.
After intensive discussions with all product owners over a few weeks, we compiled the needs of the different users and prioritized their tasks based on metrics like frequency and urgency. How often was a user doing a certain task, and how important was timeliness to that task? This would guide the development of these dashboards. Then we built some widget flows to maximize efficiency, and got to work as a team, developing our initial widget concept framework.
Due to the goals of this project, we decided to run a first click test on this project. We gathered six users who fit the description of someone who would use this type of software in their work. We chose some of the highest priority tasks from our feature explorations, and asked users to execute those tasks in a prototype of our proposed new dashboard design.
After completing the usability research, it was clear that the goals of the dashboard were not being met. Users couldn't find high-priority tasks, and it was clear that most of the widgets were too vague or too specific for a functional dashboard. If a user had a handful of apps, the dashboard would get unweildy and cause more problems than solutions. We explored a different home dashboard that would be based on an agenda mindset, featuring notifications as the driving force, so singular tasks could be addressed on their own. We would also surface sets of widgets on the right side of the dashboard that were based on tasks that needed to be frequently addressed like time clocks and payroll data. The flow created for this dashboard would push lower-priority, product-specific issues to product dashboards, and allow for third-tier priorities to be addressed in the deeper corners of the product suite.
