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Role: UX Designer
Project Length: 2 months
Type: Internal dashboard visual redesign
Impact: Volunteer initiative (20% project)
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While working on the Sales team at Google Cloud and making a career change, I had the opportunity to design for an internal data product as part of Google's 20% project policy. One of my mentors at the company introduced me to the team and identified a need where I could help out.
The Reporting Console is a dashboard where employees can check on the status of their data pull requests from various sources. However, it was difficult for users to understand the details of their request, and the product lacked visual consistency with other products in the same group. This product had no previous designers, and developers needed a blueprint to reference for future redesigns.
Main challenges included limited data on how users interacted with the product, and no documented user flows. I relied on close communication with the product manager and developers to try and understand user challenges and what they were trying to accomplish. Looking back, I would have spent more time interviewing users and understanding what they were trying to use this product for.
There were also no previous designs or wireframes to reference. Initially, I was provided with a single screenshot of the existing product and could not trial it for myself. Additionally, documentation did not exist for the product yet.
In order to better understand the structure of the Reporting Console, I divided the original screenshot into different sections and identified what each part of the dashboard meant.
After thinking about ways to rearrange the existing information into cards, I created several sketches. The team mentioned that visual consistency was really important, so I referenced another product to help with references for UI and layout.
Before presenting for feedback from developers, I worked with the Sr. UX Designer to go through multiple iterations. We went through 14 versions before presenting to the larger team.
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High fidelity wireframes were uploaded to an internal feedback tool, where the developers and product manager could comment and highlight certain sections. The main feedback was around having one filter for the entire page, versus separate ones for each of the cards. I referenced the other product to play around with the filter option there and replicated it into the new versions.
Other feedback was around the proper titles for certain data labels, or adding additional titles based on the underlying code.
Two versions were handed off to the team, with slight variations in the card arrangements at the bottom. This was based on additional feedback on how the developers expected users to interact with the data. Overall, this project was a great chance to work around constraints and limited context. It was also a good experience to work with the same design system that Googlers across the world are using to build products we use everyday.
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