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DASHBOARDSSNAPSHOTS

LEAD PRODUCT DESIGNER

Design management, design strategy, research facilitator, testing, UX/UI design

This project showcases how I started a design with clearly understanding personas and user workflows. When would users need snapshot? What would they use snapshot for? What delivery methods did each party want? These questions drove me to iterated and validated before formalizing the designs

Report &dashboard 

Snapshots

IS SNAPSHOT SIMPLY SENDING OUT REPORTS?

In a nutshell, report & dashboard snapshots capture what your report looks like at the moment the snapshot is taken. Regularly finance users  create a snapshot and share to others. Anyone with a Snapshot link is able to view it.

 

At first, the design assumptions that I got focused on the action of emailing out dashboards in pdf. Due to financial security model, receivers would need to log back to the system before they could download the pdf.

That's simple, isn't it? Not really!

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personas

This is a collaborative effort that I conducted together with another UX resource. We talked to 13 internal experts and 21 Adaptive customers to understand their user goals, challenges and task flows

Task Flow Analysis

Another common practice I normally conducted, was task analysis. This process helped me to evolve the requirements, growing from general statements to final detail of what the system needed to support. The analysis outcomes then were used to validate with users, to communicate with teams, and to contribute during the requirement gathering process

Snapshots - Tasks Analysis

snapshot &

budget life cycle

WORKFLOW  ITERATION

 

It's important to understand why this feature is so needed for general analytics, and even so much more for Adaptive apps with specific finance use cases.

For an example, permission/restriction rules didn't allow multi users to look at the same data. Looking directly at dashboards or reports, each user may not see the same numbers that other people did. This raised more critical needs to view snapshots when they had financial planning collaboration. Snapshot was the only chance that different users could look at the same source of truth, which told their business performance.

Then it came to visualizing the process of how user leveraged snapshot feature through a budget cycle. Who may create and who may consume them? When would they need snapshot and what for? 

Snapshots

snapshot management

With scheduling capability, for monthly reports, snapshots could be done ahead of time in bulk, using different parameters for different groups/levels. This helped to reduce work for FP&A tremendously, comparing to manually creating, one-by-one process.

Then it came to question if snapshots should be saved, shared, stored, managed in folders? Would they be archived, auto-deleted or mandated to backup locally? Would we charge for excessive storage space?

The answer was yes, for over-time analysis purpose, snapshots needed to be saved in a repository where user could continue to modify sharing, download, email, delete, etc. Adaptive won't play as data warehouse, we would eventually charge for space and encourage user to back up their files locally.

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THE ON GOING INVESTIGATION

THE OPEN QUESTIONS

MOCKUPS

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The open questions

In my study at Adaptive Live 2019, there were still open questions and issues that needed further investigation.

Existing fixed date/time settings for schedule snapshot didn't work well with monthly-report use case, the most primary use case. Finance monthly close dates are fluctuated, e.g. month end date falls into weekends or holiday, book can't close on time, etc.

 

Explore a way to tie scheduled snapshot with Workflow or Process Tracker based on event: financial book-close approval

 

Beside fixed date settings, we should explore to support another option: "Upon book-close approval"

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