Projects Dashboard App for executives
Problem: How might we create a simple way for executives to keep track of capital projects running in their organisation?
My role: UX Lead
Background: We spoke a few our of potential end users who were mainly in the Executive band of Federal government Departments and tried to understand the challenges they currently had in having single view of their key projects. Some of the key challenges were:
1. Different formats and mediums of reporting project statuses
2. Inconsistency in the P3M frameworks used due to the absence of a central PMO
3. Cumbersome reports in Excel or similar tools that aren't easy to use or quick to digest information
4. Inability to set triggers for alerting when something goes off track
5. Difficulty to access reports without using special software or being in the org network
With these inputs, I started creating a map of these issues and how we could solve them. Since we had a project reporting platform, some of the issues with consistency of reporting using a common framework was already being solved with our strategy execution platform strategydotzero. There surely was an opportunity to make the whole platform mobile- friendly and thus make the system available anytime, anywhere.
After some iterative co-design sessions, we decided that making an iPad app focused on Projects was the first thing we could quickly do.
Below are some mockups of how this turned out.
Splash screen: Since this was an app that was running on the strategydotzero platform, it made sense to name it as such and keep the branding simple.
Landing page: This quickly gives a summary of the statuses of key things such as Projects, Stakeholder Impact, Benefits realisation and Capability Improvement. Since this was an done in an agile manner, the focus for the first phase was just Projects to solve the immediate problem for our users.
Themes: The dark theme that was earlier used created some polarised views about aesthetic preferences and time of the day when the app would generally be used. I decided that it is probably wise to have a light theme which the user could quickly switch on/off.
Project Detail: Every project has a few key indicators such an scope, schedule and budget. Using this mental model of users, the project view was structured by creating tabs that detailed out each of these indicators to provide enough room to scale later on. Each tab was aided with visual cues that provided just enough to indicate if there was an issue with an option to delve into the details if it was necessary.
The design phase project for this project was completed in about 2 weeks which was highly iterative with constant engagement with users.
