SAS
Dashbaord
Overview
Role
The business had highlighted that managing multiple casinos across several platforms was becoming time-consuming for the account managers. I was asked to create a dashboard for account managers to use for their online casino accounts. The dashboard would need to be easy to use across multiple brands, with the functionality of adding games, blog posts, and offers. This dashboard should save time for the employees and also save money for the business.
User Research, Interaction, Visual design, Prototyping & Testing
Status: Complete
Place of work: ActiveWin Media
User Research
The brief was to create a dashboard where account managers could log in and edit content across multiple casino brands. The goal was to save time for the account managers and also save money for the business.
With research at the forefront, I went on to arranging user interviewers. I wanted to establish the typical day-to-day tasks for an account manager
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The results were:
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Adding games to a casino website
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Adding new offer banners to a casinos website
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updating blog posts
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changing casinos branding i.e. colour schemes
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updating a casino's terms and conditions.
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Now that these journeys were established, it gave me a good understanding of what functionality would be required from this dashboard.
The process
I needed to make sure the dashboard was as simple as possible for the account managers to use so that updating changes to a casino were hassle-free. Once I'd obtained an understanding of the user's needs, I started creating a site map. It's important this sitemap was as accurate as possible, as it was going to be my guide when it came to wire-framing. Having these pages mapped out also gave me an indication of the scale of the dashboard, and any integration points that might be required from a development perspective.
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Getting the developers involved early always benefits the team as a whole. It gives everyone a clear understanding of what is required from them and to catch any issues early.
Wire-framing
Once I had a good understanding of the flow of the dashboard, I went on to wireframes, which I created in Sketch. Wire-framing the dashboard helped me visualise the functionality of the dashboard and the user journey's, without getting too distracted by how it might look. I went on to prototyping the dashboard using Marvel. Prototyping the dashboard at the wire-frame stage gave me a chance to test the user journeys with the account managers early on. In the user testing sessions, I gave the account managers tasks to complete, taking notes as they went along. This session really helped me when revisiting my wireframes to make usability improvements.
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Confident that my prototype had satisfied the user, I went onto developing the dashboard visually. I turned all my symbols and objects into components so that it was not only easier for me when working on the dashboard, it also made life easier for the developers when they came to build it. Happy with the first phase of the dashboard, I continued my user testing to ensure I'd met all the user's needs.
Development
Once I was confident that the dashboard was tested, and all stakeholders were happy with the first phase, I handed it over to the developers. Developer handover is a critical part of the process, as it's easy for miscommunication to prolong a project. As I'd involved the developers early on in the process, they had a good understanding of what would be required from them.
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I exported all my artboards, components and style guides to Zeplin. Zeplin is a great platform for designers and developers to collaborate smoothly on projects together. After some back and forth, we got the dashboard in a place where account managers could begin to use it and start feeding back.
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Breaking dashboards into phased releases allows you to start looking and thinking about future improvements. This helps make changes for a user based on feedback and reliable data.