Alchemer Dashboard
The Concept
If everyone’s data is special, how can we help people standardize it for presentation?
Alchemer’s partner strategy for our dashboard product presented unique challenges for our survey-driven users. Where other datasets are regular and predictable, survey data is anything but — meaning that our software needed to fill the gaps and help users prep their data for presentation.
The Problem
Dashboards rely on predictable, structured data. Custom surveys are anything but.
Alchemer’s partner strategy for this product presented many challenges. Bridge the gap between two applications, make everything feel cohesive, and build new tooling to clean and prep data without adding too much scope.
If users hadn’t prepped their data, the partner product was nearly unusable. We needed low-effort, high-impact nudges, contextual education, and usability testing.
Build
Collect
Visualize
Monitor
The Process
Users told us over and over that the main reason they’d switch to our tool is if it saved them time.
While multiple methods of gathering feedback gave us confidence we were meeting real user needs, a consistent theme from my research was that users expected our version of a dashboard to require less work than exporting to an external tool — and with good reason.
“We spend a lot of time downloading, cleaning, and re-uploading the data into PowerBI currently. It would be so nice not to have to do that part.”
“We’ve put a lot of work into our existing Domo dashboards. This would have to be super quick to set up.”
The Outcome
We made data prep a part of survey building, saving users time later on.
We made question labeling a prominent feature with descriptive help text. This meant survey data was partly prepped before a dataset is created, making the prep step seem shorter.
We also added more robust features for managing the list of labels, allowing teams to use consistent labels across their surveys. When data is pulled into the dashboard, questions with the same label can be merged effortlessly.
We made a data preparation hub which linked to existing tools.
In order to deliver value more quickly, I designed a simple hub that directed users to existing tools for data preparation. This flow sets a simpler groundwork for more integrated tooling to be added later.
This design also highlights fast-follow functionality to allow multiple surveys to be combined based on shared labels, avoiding the need for more complex merge workflows & interfaces.
The Outcome
A few months after launch, customers were adopting a product that many said would be a lot of effort to move to from existing solutions.
Thanks for reading. No landmines were harmed…