A Real-Time Executive Dashboard for Proactive Leadership
Timeline
4 Weeks
Team
Product Designer (me)
Project Delivery Head
2 Developers
Responsibilities
UX Research
User Interface Design
Prototyping
Tools
Figma
Context
Emids, as a rapidly growing organization in the healthcare technology sector, was facing increasing challenges with its internal project monitoring processes. Senior executives were heavily reliant on manual Excel sheets to track project progress and business unit performance. This system, while initially manageable, had become increasingly cumbersome and inefficient. The critical pain point was the lack of real-time data accessibility. Whenever an executive needed an updated project report, they were forced to rely on individual project teams to manually compile and share the latest Excel sheets. This process was not only time-consuming but also prone to delays and inconsistencies, hindering timely decision-making at the executive level. This reliance on manual processes was impacting Emids' agility and proactive project management capabilities, highlighting a clear need for a modern, centralized, and real-time solution.
Impact: Delayed decision-making, reactive management, hindered growth potential.
PROBLEM
Outdated Manual Processes Hindered Executive Decision-Making
Senior leaders relied on fragmented, manually updated Excel reports, leading to:
Delayed Decisions: Data was outdated by the time it reached executives.
Reactive Management: No real-time visibility into project or business unit performance.
Inefficient Workflows: Teams wasted hours compiling reports instead of focusing on strategic tasks.
SOLUTION
A Real-Time Executive Dashboard for Proactive Leadership
A unified, interactive dashboard enabling:
Real-Time Access: Live updates for immediate insights.
Drill-Down Capabilities: From high-level business unit performance to individual project metrics.
Intuitive Visualizations: Heatmaps, graphs, and charts for quick, actionable insights.
Tableau Integration: Leveraged Tableau for rapid development and robust data handling.
Dashboard
Gain instant access to business metrics and project types across units, with the ability to drill down into specific accounts for detailed insights. Clear visualizations enable quick trend analysis, empowering executives to make data-driven decisions and drive project success and business growth.
Business Units
A business unit reveals a detailed view of project metrics, featuring a space-efficient heatmap (Heat Table) for comprehensive data visualization. The responsive design includes color-coded legends for quick interpretation, a toggle to switch between heatmap and exact values, and horizontal scrolling for seamless readability across devices.
Individual Project Details
Access a full view of the past 6 sprints by clicking on a specific project, with a dropdown menu for seamless switching between projects. The heat table format ensures visually rich, intuitive data visualization, enabling clear analysis and informed decision-making.
The final dashboard design is characterized by:
Clean and Executive-Focused Interface: A visually uncluttered interface designed to minimize distractions and maximize data clarity, catering to the visual preferences of executive users.
Instant Business Performance Overview: The Dashboard Overview delivers immediate access to key business metrics, presented in a concise and visually engaging manner, allowing for rapid comprehension of Emids' overall performance landscape.
Efficient Data Visualization: Strategic use of heatmaps in Business Unit and Project views enables the efficient display of dense datasets, facilitating quick scanning and identification of performance patterns and trends, crucial for rapid executive decision-making.
Responsive and Accessible Data Tables: Tables are designed to be fully responsive and horizontally scrollable, data readability across various devices and accommodating a comprehensive range of metrics without sacrificing user experience.
Consistent and Brand-Aligned Visual Language: A unified visual language, consistent with Emids' brand identity, is maintained throughout the dashboard, creating a predictable and professional user experience that reinforces brand recognition and trust.
PROCESS OVERVIEW
How We Transformed Chaos into Clarity
4-Week Agile Sprint: Collaborated with stakeholders, developers, and executives to deliver a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
User-Centric Design: Focused on simplicity, real-time data, and actionable insights.
Tableau for Speed: Chose Tableau for its rapid development capabilities and powerful visualization tools.
RESEARCH
Key Insights from Executives
Target Audience
Emids Senior-level Executives (e.g., CEO, VPs, Directors, and Senior Managers responsible for business unit performance and project portfolio oversight), and Project Delivery Heads who act as key intermediaries in providing project status updates to executives.
Research Process & Analysis
To deeply understand the needs of Emids executives and the limitations of their current Excel-based system, I conducted a focused research phase:
Executive Interviews: I held in-depth, semi-structured interviews with several Emids senior executives, including the VP of Operations and key Project Delivery Heads. These interviews were crucial to directly capture their pain points, understand their information needs, and identify their expectations for a new project monitoring solution.
Stakeholder Workshops: I facilitated collaborative workshops with project delivery heads and representatives from the development team. These workshops focused on:
Workflow Analysis: Mapping out the current Excel-based reporting workflow to pinpoint bottlenecks and inefficiencies.
Metric Identification: Confirming the key project and business unit metrics that were essential to track and visualize in the dashboard.
Technical Feasibility Discussions: Engaging the development team early to ensure that the proposed dashboard features were technically feasible and could be implemented within the tight 4-week timeframe.
Excel Report Analysis: I thoroughly reviewed examples of the existing Excel-based reports to understand the types of data being tracked, the limitations of the presentation format, and the potential for improvement through a dynamic dashboard interface.
Pain Points
Executives spent hours chasing reports and reconciling inconsistent data.
No single source of truth for project or business unit performance.
Needs
Real-time metrics with intuitive navigation.
Ability to drill down from high-level summaries to granular details.
Data visualisations for quick analysis.
Key Research Insights
The research phase revealed several crucial insights:
Executives were spending excessive time chasing down reports and struggling to get a holistic view of project performance. The lack of real-time data was forcing them into reactive mode.
They desired a dashboard that was not only informative but also incredibly easy to use and navigate, given their limited time.
Executives expressed a strong preference for visual data representations, particularly heatmaps, for quickly identifying trends and anomalies in large datasets.
The 4-week timeframe was a significant constraint, requiring a highly focused and prioritized approach to design and development.
DESIGN EVOLUTION
From Sketches to Iterative Refinement
Tiered Structure
Overview: High-level metrics for quick status checks.
Business Units: Drill down into performance by unit.
Projects: Granular details for individual projects.
Feedback-Driven Iterations
Added sticky legends and clear labels after stakeholder feedback.
Integrated Emids’ brand guideline.
Tableau Integration
Used Tableau’s pre-built templates for faster development.
Customized visualizations to align with executive needs.
TESTING & OUTCOMES
Validating Speed and Impact
Feedback
“The drill-down feature saves hours compared to spreadsheets!'
- Project Delivery Head
“Heatmaps and graphs make it easy to spot trends at a glance.'
- Senior Executive
Enhancement
Added date-range filters for historical trend analysis.
Improved contrast and readability for quick scanning.
Results
Delivered within 4 weeks, reducing manual reporting time by 50%.
Enabled executives to make faster, data-driven decisions.
Reflections and Future Opportunities
Learnings
Simplicity is Key: Executives value speed and clarity over complex features.
Visualizations Matter: Heatmaps, graphs, and charts each serve unique purposes for different data types.
Rapid Development Works: Tableau allowed us to deliver a robust solution in record time.
Next Steps
Expand Testing: Include C-suite executives for broader feedback.
Enhance Customization: Allow executives to personalize their dashboard views.
Your thoughts and feedback are welcome to make this system even better for future iterations.
A Real-Time Executive Dashboard for Proactive Leadership
Timeline
4 Weeks
Team
Product Designer (me)
Project Delivery Head
2 Developers
Responsibilities
UX Research
User Interface Design
Prototyping
Tools
Figma
Context
Emids, as a rapidly growing organization in the healthcare technology sector, was facing increasing challenges with its internal project monitoring processes. Senior executives were heavily reliant on manual Excel sheets to track project progress and business unit performance. This system, while initially manageable, had become increasingly cumbersome and inefficient. The critical pain point was the lack of real-time data accessibility. Whenever an executive needed an updated project report, they were forced to rely on individual project teams to manually compile and share the latest Excel sheets. This process was not only time-consuming but also prone to delays and inconsistencies, hindering timely decision-making at the executive level. This reliance on manual processes was impacting Emids' agility and proactive project management capabilities, highlighting a clear need for a modern, centralized, and real-time solution.
Impact: Delayed decision-making, reactive management, hindered growth potential.
PROBLEM
Outdated Manual Processes Hindered Executive Decision-Making
Senior leaders relied on fragmented, manually updated Excel reports, leading to:
Delayed Decisions: Data was outdated by the time it reached executives.
Reactive Management: No real-time visibility into project or business unit performance.
Inefficient Workflows: Teams wasted hours compiling reports instead of focusing on strategic tasks.
SOLUTION
A Real-Time Executive Dashboard for Proactive Leadership
A unified, interactive dashboard enabling:
Real-Time Access: Live updates for immediate insights.
Drill-Down Capabilities: From high-level business unit performance to individual project metrics.
Intuitive Visualizations: Heatmaps, graphs, and charts for quick, actionable insights.
Tableau Integration: Leveraged Tableau for rapid development and robust data handling.
Dashboard
Gain instant access to business metrics and project types across units, with the ability to drill down into specific accounts for detailed insights. Clear visualizations enable quick trend analysis, empowering executives to make data-driven decisions and drive project success and business growth.
Business Units
A business unit reveals a detailed view of project metrics, featuring a space-efficient heatmap (Heat Table) for comprehensive data visualization. The responsive design includes color-coded legends for quick interpretation, a toggle to switch between heatmap and exact values, and horizontal scrolling for seamless readability across devices.
Individual Project Details
Access a full view of the past 6 sprints by clicking on a specific project, with a dropdown menu for seamless switching between projects. The heat table format ensures visually rich, intuitive data visualization, enabling clear analysis and informed decision-making.
The final dashboard design is characterized by:
Clean and Executive-Focused Interface: A visually uncluttered interface designed to minimize distractions and maximize data clarity, catering to the visual preferences of executive users.
Instant Business Performance Overview: The Dashboard Overview delivers immediate access to key business metrics, presented in a concise and visually engaging manner, allowing for rapid comprehension of Emids' overall performance landscape.
Efficient Data Visualization: Strategic use of heatmaps in Business Unit and Project views enables the efficient display of dense datasets, facilitating quick scanning and identification of performance patterns and trends, crucial for rapid executive decision-making.
Responsive and Accessible Data Tables: Tables are designed to be fully responsive and horizontally scrollable, data readability across various devices and accommodating a comprehensive range of metrics without sacrificing user experience.
Consistent and Brand-Aligned Visual Language: A unified visual language, consistent with Emids' brand identity, is maintained throughout the dashboard, creating a predictable and professional user experience that reinforces brand recognition and trust.
PROCESS OVERVIEW
How We Transformed Chaos into Clarity
4-Week Agile Sprint: Collaborated with stakeholders, developers, and executives to deliver a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
User-Centric Design: Focused on simplicity, real-time data, and actionable insights.
Tableau for Speed: Chose Tableau for its rapid development capabilities and powerful visualization tools.
RESEARCH
Key Insights from Executives
Target Audience
Emids Senior-level Executives (e.g., CEO, VPs, Directors, and Senior Managers responsible for business unit performance and project portfolio oversight), and Project Delivery Heads who act as key intermediaries in providing project status updates to executives.
Research Process & Analysis
To deeply understand the needs of Emids executives and the limitations of their current Excel-based system, I conducted a focused research phase:
Executive Interviews: I held in-depth, semi-structured interviews with several Emids senior executives, including the VP of Operations and key Project Delivery Heads. These interviews were crucial to directly capture their pain points, understand their information needs, and identify their expectations for a new project monitoring solution.
Stakeholder Workshops: I facilitated collaborative workshops with project delivery heads and representatives from the development team. These workshops focused on:
Workflow Analysis: Mapping out the current Excel-based reporting workflow to pinpoint bottlenecks and inefficiencies.
Metric Identification: Confirming the key project and business unit metrics that were essential to track and visualize in the dashboard.
Technical Feasibility Discussions: Engaging the development team early to ensure that the proposed dashboard features were technically feasible and could be implemented within the tight 4-week timeframe.
Excel Report Analysis: I thoroughly reviewed examples of the existing Excel-based reports to understand the types of data being tracked, the limitations of the presentation format, and the potential for improvement through a dynamic dashboard interface.
Pain Points
Executives spent hours chasing reports and reconciling inconsistent data.
No single source of truth for project or business unit performance.
Needs
Real-time metrics with intuitive navigation.
Ability to drill down from high-level summaries to granular details.
Data visualisations for quick analysis.
Key Research Insights
The research phase revealed several crucial insights:
Executives were spending excessive time chasing down reports and struggling to get a holistic view of project performance. The lack of real-time data was forcing them into reactive mode.
They desired a dashboard that was not only informative but also incredibly easy to use and navigate, given their limited time.
Executives expressed a strong preference for visual data representations, particularly heatmaps, for quickly identifying trends and anomalies in large datasets.
The 4-week timeframe was a significant constraint, requiring a highly focused and prioritized approach to design and development.
DESIGN EVOLUTION
From Sketches to Iterative Refinement
Tiered Structure
Overview: High-level metrics for quick status checks.
Business Units: Drill down into performance by unit.
Projects: Granular details for individual projects.
Feedback-Driven Iterations
Added sticky legends and clear labels after stakeholder feedback.
Integrated Emids’ brand guideline.
Tableau Integration
Used Tableau’s pre-built templates for faster development.
Customized visualizations to align with executive needs.
TESTING & OUTCOMES
Validating Speed and Impact
Feedback
“The drill-down feature saves hours compared to spreadsheets!'
- Project Delivery Head
“Heatmaps and graphs make it easy to spot trends at a glance.'
- Senior Executive
Enhancement
Added date-range filters for historical trend analysis.
Improved contrast and readability for quick scanning.
Results
Delivered within 4 weeks, reducing manual reporting time by 50%.
Enabled executives to make faster, data-driven decisions.
Reflections and Future Opportunities
Learnings
Simplicity is Key: Executives value speed and clarity over complex features.
Visualizations Matter: Heatmaps, graphs, and charts each serve unique purposes for different data types.
Rapid Development Works: Tableau allowed us to deliver a robust solution in record time.
Next Steps
Expand Testing: Include C-suite executives for broader feedback.
Enhance Customization: Allow executives to personalize their dashboard views.
Your thoughts and feedback are welcome to make this system even better for future iterations.