Data exploration and customisable reporting to help brands tell their customer care story

Customisable Reporting

Google Design Sprint
Q3 2018

ROLE

Coordinator and Facilitator

The Google Design Sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping and testing ideas with customers. Use the sprint framework when you need to solve a big problem, work fast and keep business investment low.

With brands starting to ask for more from Conversocial’s reporting suite, it seemed only natural, given the scale of the challenge that the Product and Design Team used the sprint framework to drive product improvements of the app.

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The Challenge

The sprint team was tasked with taking a user-centric approach to developing a reporting solution that would give brands richer reporting features and more access to data. The team would need to deliver an MVP version of the solution within 12 weeks.

Planning the Sprint

As the facilitator, it was my responsibility to manage time, conversations, and the overall sprint process, but not only that, I acted as coordinator too.

Planning Responsibilities

  • Expert and Team Recruitment
  • Defining Sprint Timetable
  • Organising Research
  • Finding a Suitable workspace
  • Organising Lightning Demos
  • Getting Equipment

Since this was the first Design Sprint for many of the team and a large proportion were non-designers, I ensured that the Sprint deck included step-by-step instructions for each methodology.

Monday

Monday is about understanding the problem. The team got stuck in by sharing knowledge, interviewing experts from within the business, as well as customers and setting short and long term goals.

There were clear patterns in user and stakeholder pain points:

  • Customers could not access the data they required, often asking to find their own insights
  • Requests for data were draining valuable engineering resource and took too long to gather
  • Using the reporting product was tedious and unenjoyable
  • The reporting product was not rich enough, missing key
  • features like scheduling and custom report building

Short Term Goal

Deliver an MVP reporting solution to enable customers to easily report on key metrics

Long Term Goal

Deliver an enterprise-level reporting solution that helps brands to tell their customer care story

The team spent the afternoon creating an Affinity Map using ‘How Might We’ notes which were prioritised by dot voting and added to our problem map.

The problem map helped the team to focus:

  • Personas: Report Consumer & Report Builder
  • The end goal: Consuming a report
  • Key workflows: Explore data, assemble and deliver report
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Tuesday & Wednesday

The next two days of the sprint were about developing and critiquing ideas. The sprint team focused on concepts that could help users explore data and deliver detailed reports, following the 4 step sketch process.

Ah-ha Moment

Lightening talks helped the team learn more about industry-leading reporting solutions—Seeing how users could investigate data using natural language ultimately lead to the creation of a Flexible Query Builder, the key feature within our solution.

The feature would enable users to quickly create charts by selecting dimensions, metrics and filters from a simple sentence.

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Choosing a Direction

The team discussed the highlights from each solution, each capturing important details. By dot voting we were able to establish what ideas and features would make it into a prototype.

Priority features included:

  • Flexible Query Builder
  • Explorable Insights and data-sets
  • Suggested and 'create your own' charts
  • Scheduling and formating reports
  • Layout grid for easy report building

Thursday

The entire day on Thursday was dedicated to prototyping our solution, ready for testing with customers. The team split into two, with engineers focusing on stress testing the Flexible Query Builder and the rest of the team rapidly working on UI and a customer presentation.

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Friday

Crunch time! The last day of the sprint is all about validation. When planning for the sprint I had arranged calls with 3 early access customers giving them each 45-minute slots.

The team documented feedback during each call and grouped them where they saw patterns.

Customers loved the Flexible Query Builder but wanted to investigate in more detail

Customers loved time saving features, in particular scheduling and drag & drop report builder

“Looks great! It’s exactly where reporting needs to be”
- Thomas, Data Analyst

Areas to Improve

Whilst feedback was generally very positive, participants thought that there were still ways in which we could improve the solution.

  • Test query builder in more detail
  • Ability to combine charts
  • Ability to export to CSV

Next Steps

A project of this scale and magnitude required further validation and testing. The team visited customers on site to speak with managers who helped define the MVP solution by reviewing designs and completing the $100 Spend task.

Next Steps

  • Build and test a functioning version of the query builder prototype
  • Prioritise features for MVP and incremental release
  • Test existing prototype with more customers
  • Wireframe and test all key flows
  • Create hi-fi designs for the Design Language System
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