PROJECT 1

Hey there, you busy recruiters and managers 👋
If you're short on time, here's a quick rundown to get you up to speed. (Readers interested in more detail might prefer to skip this summary and start with the next section.)

DataGuardian (customer name anonymized for privacy) specializes in storing Salesforce data that powers crucial business interactions worldwide. Their latest mission? To transform their vault of data backups into pure gold with Machine Learning, powered by a bit of magic 🪄 from the folks at TensorIoT.

As the sole designer on the project team, I kicked things off by conjuring up a dashboard that's far from your average data display, in an action-packed two week sprint. Leveraging insights from stakeholder interviews and informal user research, I rapidly crafted a dashboard that turned everyday business data into a compelling narrative.

This initiative will arm the sales teams of DataGuardian's clientele with razor-sharp new insights on their existing data. They'll be able to easily spot their most promising sales opportunities, ensuring their actions hit their targets with unmatched accuracy and impact.

DataGuardian: Safeguarding Your Business's Digital Heartbeat

Meet our customer DataGuardian, anonymized here to honor confidentiality agreements. Today, DataGuardian offers a solution to securely store what's essentially the diary of the business world—Salesforce CRM data, where companies jot down every customer interaction, from the smallest nod to the firmest handshake. Yet, the real magic DataGuardian plans to unleash is still on the horizon. Their next move? Transforming customers' data into sharp insights, set to empower businesses to make bold, informed decisions.

Unlocking the Vault of Data’s Potential

To start, DataGuardian concentrated on their clients' sales data within Salesforce — just the first area among many, like marketing and operations, ripe for exploration. Their goal was to pinpoint the best opportunities for their clients' sales team to pursue, turning mere data storage into a rich source of actionable insights.

Enter the TensorIoT team. My role as the sole designer on this project was to distill the complexities of the available data and machine learning predictions into designs for a clear, engaging dashboard. This wasn't just about making data look pretty; it was about crafting a tool that would become indispensable to DataGuardian's clients, enabling their sales teams to zero in on opportunities with the biggest yields.

The QuickSight Quest: Design Discovery to Sign-Off In Two Weeks

In our initial discovery and design sprint, my knack for asking incisive questions and bringing customer ideas to life steered the project, ensuring smooth and successful progress. Here are some highlights:

1. Kicking Off Design Discovery To start, I tapped into our sales team's knowledge about DataGuardian's goals and challenges to shape some initial design sketches.
2. Creative Solution Crafting During our initial discovery call, I realized my sketches weren't compelling or "cool" enough for DataGuardian’s needs. So, I revisited the designs, drawing inspiration from QuickSight's DemoCentral and discussing available data with our developers to brainstorm new graph concepts.
3. Initiative in User Research Despite typical project constraints like limited time and resources for user research, I identified a chance for valuable user insight right within our team. Given our own sales team perfectly matched the target user profile, I initiated some quick, direct user research.
4. Achieving Final Sign-off Through several more cycles of discovery, sketch iterations, and review with both the customer and developers, I honed in on graph choices that narrated a well-rounded and compelling story, enriched by insights from my user research.

Bringing Design Dreams to Data Life

As we moved from design to development, our goal was to make sure the dashboard matched our vision, tackling technical challenges with creativity. I led the effort to keep design and development in sync, frequently reviewing the UI against my designs and discussing discrepancies with developers.

Challenges arose when developers indicated certain parts of my designs weren’t feasible within QuickSight. In those moments, I collaborated closely with the devs, ideating on alternative solutions that continued to meet user needs and deliver value, all while being achievable within QuickSight's framework and our project timeline.

The Big Reveal: A Tool That Sees the Future 🔮

The unveiling of the final PoC dashboard was a momentous occasion, met with enthusiasm and accolades from DataGuardian. Their expectations were not only met but exceeded, leading to immediate discussions for further collaborations between our two companies. The success of the dashboard underscored my ability to turn complex data into an intuitive, engaging tool for decision-making.

Charting the Course: Lessons from the UX Voyage

Mastering an unfamiliar tool and navigating the new, detailed world of sales pipelines proved to be a rewarding challenge. This experience showcased my adaptability and dedication to growing my UX design skills, while also highlighting my quick ability to learn and innovate in new areas.

The success of my designs for this project sparked notable changes within our organization and beyond:

1. My work with QuickSight led our company to adopt it for more projects, enhancing our visualization tools.
2. The success of this project prompted my company to replace an costly, custom internal tool with a QuickSight dashboard, cutting weekly costs by over $600.
3. My dashboard designs drew attention from Amazon's QuickSight designers, resulting in an invite for my team to beta test their new Figma library.
4. After asking me to showcase this solution company-wide, our CEO praised the user research I conducted on the project, urging the entire company to pursue similar efforts on other projects.

Sketches and Wireframes for Remaining Pages

Because I had one foot in the content strategy and creation, and one foot in the design and development of the website, I was in an excellent position to plan out the remaining pages. I quickly sketched each page, using a pen and paper, and making sure that the styling was in line to the home page styling that Jeremy created. My main priorities were to structure the pages following good usability principles, and to ensure that all of the content was represented. After iterating on the pages with the developer and client, I created wireframes of the pages using Sketch.

Further Content Creation

Natalie was so pleased with the content that I had created for the home page that she asked me to help her with the content for the rest of the site. In reviewing and helping to create this content, I was able to ensure that the website copy remained consistent and was written in a conversational tone.

As Natalie received resources from her team to add to the website, such as doctor articles and testimonials and other educational content, I edited each piece. I focused on removing any jargon and any words or phrases that were corporate-sounding, verbose, or pedantic. I ensured that each sentence made sense and was concise, and had no grammatical errors. Above all, I checked that every piece of the copy had purpose and significantly contributed to the overall message.