Background
Amplitude is a product analytics platform that empowers customers to gain insights into user behavior and make data-driven decisions. As data is the foundation of all our features, we launched our new customer data platform. This new product allows users to seamlessly synchronize data across their entire stack, enabling them to make the most of their product analytics.
Overview - Problems statement
Land on "Events" page
Users are encountering challenges when utilizing the platform and understanding the flow of data on the current landing page, the Events Table. Despite being the core functionality of the data, it lacks overall information and insights into data flow. The large data table is making it difficult for users to navigate and take action on their data. Therefore, we need a dashboard to help users navigate and understand data flow in their projects.
Discovery - stakeholder interview & competitive analysis
Stakeholder Interviews
Competitors Audits
After engaging with stakeholders and conducting thorough competitors audits, I have identified the following key insights to inform the direction of our user research:
Insight 1
The primary user of the homepage is the data governor, who is responsible for managing data in the project.
Insight 2
The homepage should provide users with relevant information and insights about their projects, allowing them to take actions to resolve issues.
Insight 3
The homepage serves as an effective place for onboarding and educating new users.
Discovery - set up goals
Be informed
How might we help our customers get a glimpse into their data health and be alerted to problems before it becomes a big deal?
Take action
How might we enable all customers to get to the action they need on the homepage as their starting point in the workflow?
Learn
For relatively new customers, how might we help them to understand and start using the product and have a way to solve their problems?
Business goals: increase active governing organization. (10% currently)
Discovery - customer interview
Research questions:
Our interviews include interview questions and a card sorting exercise where we asked the customers to categorize the provided information into 3 group according to importance.
According to customers' answers towards their workflow and rank of the importance, we got following insights:
Insight 1
90% of the time, they take the same action when landing on the page
Insight 2
Data health and pipeline error are the most important information
Insight 3
Data connection is not that important after setup, and branch is only for temporary use
Insight 4
A single number of event volume is not useful, customer need to see more insights that is hard to be noticed
Design - Challenge 1
We actually started design before we finished the research, so we made assumptions and go divergent on the first version of wireframe:
According to the insights from the research and feedback from the stakeholders, I did following changes to fit users' needs:
Design - Challenge 2
I did a lot of design explorations in the overall layout and visual explorations in each sections, and followings are 2 representative wireframes:
Let's zoom in to take a close look on visual and micro interaction:
01. Data Health
02. Event
03. Learning part
By synthesizing the feedback, and have a vote on different layouts and visual explorations, I decide on the final visual layout:
Design - Challenge 3
"Home" tab locates under the branch, but it only related to infomation under the main.
For example, when user is on the homepage and changes branch to "test", they stay on the same page, but might misunderstand the information is under "test".
Therefore, how might we make it less weird when users change branch and more clear of where they are on the homepage?
I explored 3 options as follows to settle the problem:
I chose option 2 because we planned to do the navigation redesign in Q4 to fundamentally solve the problem. Therefore, in this project, we decided to use the minimum effort to solve the problem.
Design
We included engineer team in the whole process to make sure all the feature is within the technical constraints. However, as another project in tracking plan going on, the event page feature changed, so we confirmed with the other teams, and made final change to the details in the data health, and top events.
Iteration
Reflecting on the entire process, I have seen some design opportunities, but didn't have a chance to do a complete research synthesis to dig more on them. Therefore, in the end of my internship, I proactively proposed to do another round of research.
Here are some insights and implication for the future iteration:
1. The metrics of data health are different for different teams at different stages.
Implication: The ability to customize their data health metrics is important. Including customizing the issue they want to focus, and also how they define each issue.
2. When customers look at the recent activities, they always have a specific purpose, rather than read through it.
Implication: rather than a snippet of recent activities that might not useful for the users, the data home might only show the summarized information.
3. Homepage should reveal some information that customer might not notice.
Implication: the single numbers for event volume might not be that useful for the users. Rather than the top events by volume, they probably prefer to see some unusual change, and see how events contributed to the total volume. For example, does the unused event take up a lot of event volume? They want to dig into the event volume in different ways to make the tracking plan more effective.
Reflection
1. Actively and effectively getting feedback from wider audience
Getting feedback is particularly important in my project, because the homepage is not only one page, it related to different features across different teams. I could always get unexpected useful information when talking to people. For example, I got feedback on the time frame issue that I even didn’t notice from a product review meeting
I also learned a lot on getting feedback effectively. At different stages, I focused on different issues, being specific and visually emphasize on what you want can help the audiences navigate and provide more useful feedback.
2. There is no perfect design process
In different teams and different projects, the design process can be varied due to the different resources and timelines. There is no success formula in design process, getting adapted to or proposing different design process according to the real situation is the key to success. Problem-solving is not only applied in design but also in every step in the work.
In this project, I learned to navigate in the ambiguity when we don’t have a clear plan at the beginning. I had to leverage the limited resource to make assumption for design before we do the research.
3. Research takes time
Research can take longer time than I expect. We need to carefully consider the research period, and arrange the things ahead of time. I didn’t plan enough time for the research phase at the beginning because I didn't expect the customer interview can be scheduled very late. Being aware of this, and carefully plan the timeline is very important in team work.