Mindbody // 2018
Insights Dashboard
Overview
Mindbody is a business management platform those in the health and wellness industries. This project focused on creating an interactive summary dashboard for fitness business owners, offering key insights that are digestible and paint a complete picture of the health of the business.
The problem
Mindbody is a robust product. It provides a wealth of business data, but to get it users must dig through a library of reports and manually crunch numbers to get an insightful result. Because of this, business owners and managers find accessing their top KPIs to be difficult and tedious which impacts their ability to get a clear picture of their business health.
“I know I could export and build my own spreadsheet to calculate myself, but don’t have time. I have considered hiring someone to do this for me.”
The opportunity
Surface top level insights to customers so that they may better understand the health of their business and ultimately grow.
Scope: For this project, we would only focus on a specific subset of our users—class-based businesses—and leverage our existing reporting functionality, refraining from creating new data points or reports.
The process
Align on the problem
Initially, the goal of this project was to go all in on a retention dashboard and add it to the dashboard suite we already had. While it made sense to surface retention data, I wasn't convinced that adding another dashboard page would really solve the problem.
The state of the existing dashboard was inconsistent, outdated, and didn’t support an overall cohesive experience for the user.
Retention proved to be much more than a single data point or dashboard page for our users, taking into account many different aspects of the business (sales, attendance, client satisfaction, and so on).
So how did we get to retention in the first place? 🤔
I raised this question with my team, and we revisited the “why” that brought us to this point. Working sessions were put on with the support, customer service, and education teams to really understand customer pain points and perspectives.
During these sessions, it became clear that the lack of retention data wasn’t the main problem after all. Instead, it was a broader issue of how we deliver insights in general.
So, we used these new learnings to redefine the problem in a way that aligned more closely to our user’s true needs.
The new problem
Business owners aren’t able to gauge the overall health of their business—they need a way to see retention top-level insights as well as dig into the details to better improve their business.
Strategy and vision
With the right problem in front of us, I got to work on a design strategy. I mapped out an iterative approach to designing a brand new dashboard experience, outlining a feasible path to create an MVP and incrementally build upon it to reach a long-term ideal vision.
After getting buy-in on the strategy and approach, I developed a design plan to factor in research, concept ideation and iterations, and detailed design. I also put design principles in place to ensure that we design with our customers needs in focus.
Challenge: system thinking
This project was daunting at first. There was much to do, both in designing a new page while also looking ahead into how it could fit into a new system. By splitting my perspective between the macro system (overarching structure, page controls, etc.) and the micro system (card layout, customization), I was able to give myself structure and focus, approaching each part separately without losing the big picture.
Design and testing
The first step was to understand the full customer journey. I mapped out user motivations and needs by business maturity and software usage. This gave myself and my team a better idea as to what information needed to be shown and when, and ultimately started informing page structure and layout.
Challenge: wrangling content
More is not always better. With the abundance of data we could display to our customers, it was imperative to surface it in the right way and draw the right connections between each metric. I spent most of my time evaluating the existing dashboard content, sorting KPIs, and prioritizing metrics to ensure customers would get the full picture.
When it was time to explore some concepts, I collected as many ideas as I could through design studios. From here, I pulled the strongest ideas and began consolidating them for concept testing.
Wireframe concepts were tested with customers and tested things like layout, amount of information presented, and prominence of metrics. When we weren’t testing with customers, I was collecting feedback from my colleagues across from the break room.
Challenge: more than a number
Our customers – the yoga studio owners, the CrossFit gym managers, the self-starter fitness enthusiasts – aren’t of the business analyst types (shocker). Rather, they’re people with a passion for health and wellness who want to share that with others. So, our challenge went beyond defining and displaying the right numbers. I had to communicate what those numbers actually meant. I tackled this challenge by forming the story with natural language, visual elements, and access to educational content when needed.
The results
The final summary dashboard was complete with high value business-related alerts, configurable top line KPIs, and detailed sections with trend-based data. Beyond that, it was structured to scale to a newly defined dashboard system that would eventually house more business data, trends, and goals.
Takeaways
Communicate early and often. Throughout this project, I was in constant contact with my team framing problems, validating design decisions, and reinforcing the long-term vision. Bringing them on the journey not only ensured alignment but also built trust along the way, which was key in taking on such a large project with many stakeholders involved.