How To Optimise The User Experience
Written by: Sachin Parmar
Are you thinking of creating a dashboard to refine your internal processes? Don’t venture any further until you’ve fully researched and planned the user experience, otherwise your dashboard risks being nothing more than a pretty ornament. Sachin Parmar, Co-founder and Creative Director from evokeu, London’s leading boutique digital marketing and branding agency, explains why the user experience should be central to the design of your dashboard.
When designing a dashboard, it’s easy to get caught up in the look and feel without considering how it will be used. User experience should be first and foremost in your mind when plotting the structure of your dashboard. Evokeu worked with insurance solutions company, Bell & Clements to build a dashboard for in-house insurance brokers to use when checking applications. Similar dashboards could be created for service providers in the financial, corporate and hospitality sectors.
Understand your user
Before putting pen to paper, you need to get in the mind of the user to better understand how they would pilot the dashboard. By creating user case studies to define the different types of users, you’ll gain clarity as to how the dashboard should be structured. Bell & Clements had an existing dashboard to refer to when gathering intel, which helped to identify what was working well and what wasn’t for each user case study. With the support of evokeu, this prior research highlighted that the navigation of the dashboard needed to be improved to ensure a more user-friendly experience.
Make the user experience clear and efficient
Once you’ve established how your dashboard will be used, you need to make the interface clear and concise to increase efficiency. For Bell & Clements, evokeu developed a working wireframe, which helped to visualise each user experience and how they would use the dashboard from start to finish. The wireframe guided the design of the dashboard and made it easier to tweak and adjust areas that weren’t working. Like your dashboard, your wireframe will be constantly evolving and adapting; it’ll never be a complete piece of work.
Functionality is just as important as aesthetic
Although a visually attractive dashboard is important, it shouldn’t be your only concern. An intuitive dashboard is just as critical and will go hand-in-hand with the latter point on making your user experience clear and efficient. When the team at evokeu designed Bell & Clements’ dashboard, they meticulously planned every detail of the structure, including creating user interfaces with customised icons. The entire dashboard was made to be smart, as well as appealing to the eye and on brand. Once finalised, evokeu put together a style sheet and brand guidelines, which Bell & Clements’ in-house developers could use to code the designs with pixel-perfect precision.
Keep testing and refining
Once your dashboard is up and running, it needs to be continuously assessed to guarantee that the user experience is the very best it can be. Regular testing and refining will strengthen the dashboard’s effectiveness, whether it’s adding new features or removing areas that are no longer adding to the user experience. It’s a time-consuming but necessary task, otherwise you’ll have a dashboard that looks attractive but has little to no use.
You don’t always have to start from scratch
If you’re a start-up company or the need for a dashboard is a new requirement for your business, creating a dashboard from scratch can feel like a daunting task. However, there are easier routes to building a bespoke dashboard that is designed to suit your needs. Evokeu has access to an array of ‘off the shelf’ products that could be ideal for your business or will provide the perfect base to configure an optimised dashboard that has a strong user experience at its core.
If you’d like to find out more about Sachin and evokeu, please visit here. You can also follow Sachin on LinkedIn, where he frequently posts business advice and inspiring content.
About the author:
Sachin Parmar is the Co-founder and Creative Director of boutique digital marketing and branding agency, evokeu. With decades of design experience, Sachin has a keen eye for detail and a drive to create consistently superior results. Sachin and his expert team work with big and small brands across many sectors to help clients capture customer attention and create growth. Evokeu also has a vertical brand called Graphic Kitchen, which specialises in the hospitality sector.
