Brandwatch, 2024
Collaborate seamlessly on dashboards
Tracks Covered
Team Involved
Product Manager, FE Engineers, BE Engineers, Content Designer
Tools Used
Figma, Balsamiq, Miro, JIRA, Confluence, Productboard
Timeline Spanned
⟢ Overview
The TL;DR Version
About Measure from Brandwatch
Measure, a B2B SaaS social analytics tool from Brandwatch, helps businesses understand their social media performance through customisable dashboards.
By tracking key metrics, showcasing trends, and visualising where and how their audience engages with their brand, Measure allows for data-driven decisions that drive profitable social media growth.
About My Role in Measure
As Product Designer, I led the design and discovery of this project, collaborating closely with the product manager and engineers, ensuring the solution was desirable for users, feasible from an engineering perspective, and viable for the business.
The designs played a key role in closing the largest ever upsell deal in the company.
Social Analytics with Measure
Collaboration who?
Imagine this: you're racing against a tight deadline to finalise a critical dashboard. Your team needs to quickly analyse the data, make quick adjustments, and then present the findings. However, you aren't able to work simultaneously or even asynchronously on the dashboard with your team, leading to a frustrating cycle of dashboard duplications and back-and-forth manual updates.
For Measure users, this wasn't an imagined scenario but a recurring, problematic, and frustrating reality. And for Measure, it meant decreasing user satisfaction and with it possible user churn.
Old Sharing Flow in Measure
Saying Goodbye to Dashboards Called 'Summer Campaign-Final-FINAL(Copy)'
To address these user and business pains we went through having to:
From 0 to 1: The Complete Project Methodology
And Hello to Actual Collaboration!
An Improved Way of Filtering Through Your Dashboards on the Homepage
An Improved Way of Sharing Dashboards With Your Teams and Colleagues in the Dashboard
And Hello to…
Big Wins
$1.6MM upsell
totalling deal to $2.6MM
$743K GRR
impact on Q4 of 2024
48% less tickets
raised to support
63% less team shares
as users use the new flow
87% task success rate
when users collaborate
20% less duplicates
as users opt out of the workaround
⟢ Problem
Subjecting Users to Difficult Realities
What are the realities being faced here?
Prohibit collaboration within a tool made for teams and what do you get? Time-consuming and error-prone workarounds for the users and increasing churn rates for the business, that’s what:
Requests from Productboard (Left) and the Workflow that Prompted Them (Right)
What do we now know with certainty?
After analysing user feedback from Productboard, I led an empathy workshop with my product manager, with the objective being to empathise with the realities of our users and understand where and how the product wasn't helping them realise their goals.
Empathy Workshop with Miro
It resulted in us defining certainties that would act as our compass, ensuring that future decisions align with our user’s needs and goals:
01
Our Users
Our users are social media managers from agencies or small businesses to large enterprises.
Seen Here Are Social Media Managers in Their Natural Habitat
02
Our Key Questions
Through the workshop, we identified user pain points which we transformed into actionable ‘How Might We' questions.
How Might We's Extracted from User Pains
03
Our Indicators for Success
At least 80% task completion rate
Indicating users successfully finished the flow
A drop in duplicate dashboards
Indicating users no longer use the workaround
A drop in related support tickets
Indicating the need for collaboration has been met
A drop in dashboards shared with teams only
Indicating users have updated the sharing settings of dashboards made before the release
⟢ UX Architecture
Making It All Work, Starting from the Inside
Building a better foundation
Before we could rework the UI, we needed to address the underlying UX architecture. Using the established HMWs as guides, I led several discussions with the PM and the engineers to ask how might we redefine the existing structures.
HMW Support Multiple Dashboard Editors
HMW Support Dashboard Retention in the Organisation
HMW Ensure Secure Data Sharing
With the foundation for collaboration laid, it was time to bring the structural changes to the surface — the user interface.
⟢ Ideation
Bringing It All Together on the Outside
Sticky note time!
Before diving into UI design, the Product Manager and I collaborated to visualise the user journey within this new UX architecture using a User Story Map.
User Story Map with Miro
Cooking up wireframes with Balsamiq vinegar
I began translating the user journey points into initial wireframes. This validated the feasibility of the flow and layout of key elements, allowing for early feedback from the Measure team and internal stakeholders.
Lofi Prototype Made Using Wireframes Made with Balsamiq
Facing tough constraints
A key technical constraint emerged: the system could only support one active editor on a dashboard at a time.
While we explored solutions that prioritised real-time collaboration and dashboard status updates, these were not feasible within the current system architecture and project timeline.
Initial UI for Sending Users Notifications of Dashboard Status
This resulted in a less-than-ideal user experience where users were required to manually check for editing availability. I advocated for a high priority follow-up release to incorporate real-time notifications, aiming to improve the user experience.
Final UI for Only One Active Dashboard Editor
Gathering external feedback
With the UX architecture and UI aligned, I created high-fidelity prototypes and previewed the solution with a key enterprise client to gather critical feedback. This exercise highlighted workflow strengths and areas for improvement, which we reviewed and used to refine the UI and UX with the team and stakeholder.
⟢ Solution
What the Kids These Days Refer to as a 'Glow-Up'
Improved 'Share Dashboard' modal
Before
After
In Full Implementation
Improved filters in the homepage
Before
After
In Full Implementation
And here she is fully!
Collaborative Dashboards in Measure
⟢ Results
The Users Win, the Business Wins — in Fact, We All Win!
Major business wins
$1.6MM upsell
with a major client, totalling their deal to over $2.5 million
$743K Gross Revenue Retention
impact on Q4 of 2024
Measured outcomes
87% task success rate
as majority of users complete the new sharing flow
48% less related tickets
raised to support about the need for collaboration
63% less team shares
As users have update the sharing settings of dashboards made before the release
20% less duplicate dashboards
as users opt out of the old workaround
While the impact was clear, there was still much work and improvements to be made, especially for such a feature that was crucial to our user's workflows.
Future releases
Future release had planned for real-time notifications, editing session time limits, and an audit log for dashboard changes, with real-time notifications taking the highest priority.
Have I had more time to focus on the project rather than splitting my attention across several large high-priority ones, I would've pushed and scheduled for more user testing on the initial prototype with.
⟢ Reflection
Well, Onto the Next!
Player Ann-Louise-R0CK$ has gained 9000 exp
Increased Proficiency for UX Architecture Skill
A key focus of this project was analysing the existing structure and relationships between key data entities within the product and reworking them to align with our UX objectives. It was genuinely complex work but I had so much fun with it.
This work deepened my expertise in creating user-centric architecture, balancing the complexities of backend structures with the simplicity needed for a good user experience.
Player Ann-Louise-R0CK$ has gained 7750 exp
Acquired New Branch Under the Wisdom Tree!
Working on a collaboration feature made me value collaboration. It can be tempting, and sometimes feel easier, to work in a silo. I’ve fallen into that mindset at times. This project taught me the true value of collaboration. Partnering with many wonderful and skilled colleagues showed me how much stronger solutions become when multiple perspectives are considered.
This experience reinforced that great design doesn’t happen in isolation, it’s a result of collective effort and shared understanding.
- END -
Much love and appreciation to the Measure team: Jaime, Vasil, Ivan, Georgi, Martin, Zdravko, Kiril, Katie, Sam, and Oli...working with you all was just the absolute bestest!