At Dataminr, I had the opportunity to lead the redesign of our desktop application. I collaborated with product managers to define user needs and business goals. I also worked closely with engineers throughout the process to understand technical constraints. The design team grew as we continued to iterate on features and I guided new designers to ensure our end result was an effective, intuitive, and consistent product.
Main dashboard and navigation
Pain points:
Pop ups everywhere: Users were frustrated that each new screen opened as a new window (i.e. main dashboard, search results, settings)
Disconnected settings experience: Users were confused about the relationship between settings and the main dashboard and weren’t sure if updating one would impact the other
Hidden functionality: Users had trouble finding how to configure their dashboard experience to meet their needs
Business goals:
More than just real-time: We had recently introduced new analytics tools and wanted to give them equal weight compared to our real-time alerting tool
Reaching customers: We currently had no place in the product for marketing announcements and support content
Early exploration
Solutions:
Tabbed navigation: Each tool lived in its own tab getting rid of pop out windows and treating each tool as equally powerful
Pane settings: We added access points settings from the same place you view content
Add pane: We made configuring your dashboard more intuitive with better placement and clearer labels
Announcements & Support tabs: We added dedicated space for marketing announcements and support content
Alert detail
For the alert detail, we updated the layout to be more editorial so that the content was easier to digest and put more emphasis on the location of the event.
Settings modal
Another critical part of the redesign was the settings modal. This is how users enter criteria for alerts they want to receive. A major pain point was that users would complete the first step (area) and hit save without realizing there were more sections to modify.
To resolve this, we made it more of a linear process. The first time a user creates a list (a set of criteria), they must go through each step, even if they just leave the defaults selected. When editing the list later, the user can go in any order and save and close whenever they are ready.
We continue to iterate on the entire desktop experience and visual style as we gather feedback from customers and introduce new features.