ACME Dashboard and Data Visualization

Designed and prototyped a dashboard for a data analytics company that allows a fraud manager to both get a quick overview of their team's progress and dive deeper into individual performers' stats.

ACME dashboard and data viz project final screen hero image

Link to full clickable Axure prototype (desktop)

Keywords: UX design, interaction design, dashboards, data visualization, iteration, prototyping, Axure

Team: 1 designer (me)

When: Sept. - Oct. 2019

Background

This project was done for a large data analytics company that asked to not be named (hence ACME is a placeholder). The client partnered with our Interaction Design II course at San Jose State University for this project. We were tasked with designing a fraud management dashboard solution meant to be used by a fraud manager of a team of analysts who respond to credit card fraud, notifying customers and resolving these issues, so that the manager can review the team's fraud strategy and make adjustments as needed.

Problems and Opportunities

User Needs:

To get a quick overview of what's going on, reviewing case info, queue status, etc.
To make quick decisions and act on events and data
To be able to export reports and graphs and dive deeper into data visualizations

Business Goals:

To present a clean, easy to use solution to fraud managers so that they can do their jobs and monitor their team's progress.

Design Process

Given the nature of the Interaction Design II course and its focus on interaction design, I did not conduct user research and instead worked under the assumption that the information we were given for the project would be normally collected through the necessary research step, so as to inform the design process. The following persona was provided to us by the client to help us understand the user needs and problems.

Persona

ACME dashboard and data viz project object-action matrix

Jeanine is a fraud manager and team leader. On a typical workday, she "wants to be able to run different scenarios that allow her to quickly respond to changing customer/applicant behavior, as well as respond to changes in results as new data becomes available."

A Perfect Day

"Instead of having to react to operational challenges in a knee- jerk fashion, she is able to proactively run scenarios that consider likely challenges, so that she has a library of scenarios and solutions ready to quickly deal with operational challenges."

Pain Points:

"Difficult to get reports to see the 'big picture'"

"Hard to find the data she needs"

"Slowed down waiting for time from IT to add data sources"

"Reports don’t provide visuals to communicate clearly to upper management"

"System performance, number of different/disparate systems needed to make a decision"

"Productivity loss due to inadequate tools and training"

Understanding the target user through Jeanine helps in identifying what the goals of the design are, the pain points that need to be addressed, and which goals should be prioritized in the design.

Conceptual Model

I developed a conceptual model to factor in what elements would be part of the user's mental model in using this dashboard. The conceptual model helped to ensure I would not leave out any critical aspects of Jeanine's use of the dashboard by identifying all of the objects and actions involved, attributes of the objects. I was better able to come up with possible design ideas knowing all of the moving parts I was working with, so to speak, while also being able to check my later designs for consistency against this conceptual model.

Object-Action Matrix

I created an object-action matrix to help with thinking about the problems to be solved, picking out four main objects: queue, analyst, model, and case, and identified the primary actions Jeanine needs to be able to perform on these objects.

Object-Attribute Tables

I then expanded each of the four objects into their corresponding attributes to build the conceptual grammar for the design. The attributes are categorized into regular ones that do not have dimensions, such as name and ID number, and dimensions for aspects that can be tracked through their measures. For example, productivity of an analyst can be measured through the number of cases that analyst completes per hour.

Object-attribute tables were created for each of the main objects: queue, analyst, model, and case.

Prioritization Matrix

Again, using the persona of Jeanine, I sorted the object-action pairs into frequently and rarely used actions. Frequent actions are thus of higher priority than rare actions, which should be reflected in the design; frequent actions should generally take fewer clicks to reach, or be within easy reach for the user. As fraud manager, Jeanine wants to be able to get a quick overview of how her team is doing, which includes monitoring and managing analysts on her team as well as the queues, cases, and models, drilling down to details, and making notes on all aspects of her team.

This priority matrix shows that object-action pairs such as monitoring queues and analysts are more frequently used than things like exporting reports on cases.

Sketches

I started designing possible dashboard solutions by making some rough sketches on paper, figuring out the layout of the design that would best help Jeanine quickly perform frequent actions and help her with managing her team's fraud strategy.

ACME dashboard and data viz project sketch 2

Sketch of the Overview page with a quadrant for each of the four objects (analyst, queue, model, case).

ACME dashboard and data viz project sketch 1

Sketch of the Queue page and notes on the Overview page.

Grid Design

To ensure that a proper grid is followed in the page layout, I put together the following grid designs based on my sketches, before making the final design. Good grid design means making sure that each region in the grid has a purpose, following proper information hierarchy and placing global actions at the top, with local actions close to the objects they affect, as well as being consistent with the grid and conceptual grammar across all multiple screens.