EPM Dashboard Catalog

The EPM Dashboard Catalog makes it easy for over 40,000 monthly active users to find and utilize pre-made dashboards and reports to inform their business decisions.

Overview

My role

An ever-increasing number of IBMers are using Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), our platform for integrated business data, to replace static spreadsheets with interactive self-serve dashboards and reports
Anyone can build a dashboard using EPM in Cognos Analytics, but it’s difficult to search for existing content which meant teams were duplicating each others’ efforts
The EPM Dashboard Catalog was created to make it easy for any EPM user to find a pre-existing dashboard or report that suits their needs, eliminating the duplication of efforts and lowering the “barrier to entry” to get started using EPM to inform business decisions.

The team

Designer, product manager, team of full-stack developers.

The scope

Improve overall site usability by uncovering the needs of IBM employees across three career personas: Manager, Executive, and Technical Leader.

Lead designer

Process

Original IBM Leadership Academy homepage

Discovery research

Before I joined the team, user research had never been done before. I convinced my executive stakeholders to allot the time for user interviews and testing by connecting user needs to business impacts like NPS score and program enrollment.

I conducted user testing for the original Leadership Academy website with a group of 28 global sponsor users, each representing one (or a combination) of the three personas: Manager, Executive, or Technical Leader. My goals were to understand the challenges each persona faced when navigating the website and observe how one would complete a task to find information relative to each persona. I asked each user to walk us through two tasks: one that all visitors may complete regardless of career and one specific to their persona.

As a result, I uncovered pain points unique to each persona as well as universal pain points:

“I find it to be very busy, my eyes have no idea where to go.”

“It’s hard for me to tell what's most important or what the Leadership Development team wants me to focus on.”

“It's not super obvious what the different areas are for, just by glancing at them, unless you knew what you were coming here for.”

“Could be more straightforward, explicit and engaging.”

Prototyping & testing

Upon completing and synthesizing my discovery research, I began redesigning each segment of Leadership Academy within two-week Agile sprints. Working through the Enterprise Design Thinking "Loop," I continuously tested my redesigns by observing my users through remote user testing, reflecting upon the results, and making changes to fit their needs. I also used A/B testing to inform decisions such as information hierarchy, navigation style, and calls to action.

At the end of every sprint I presented the newly redesigned pages to our executive stakeholders alongside the data to validate my decisions. With stakeholder approval, I passed my designs along to my team's developers to build and launch each page in a staggered approach, starting with the homepage, continuing through each career persona page, and finally every program and resource page in order of prioritization based on visit analytics.

Dream it.
Build it.
Grow it.
Sell it.