Context
With this labor of love, I sought to level up my design colleagues' data savvy. My director tasked me with combining Analytic Consultant and Designer best practices into easy, repeatable patterns.
We also wanted to shift the culture from a dashboard visual design focus to identifying flows of business and clinical questions that Artificial Intelligence (AI) or people could use to present actionable insights in new ways, such as conversations or catalog searches.
My role
I evangelized user research and Design Thinking workshops to trace from user needs to the questions they ask, to an effective information architecture, to the use of AI in designs. I inventoried 350 existing dashboards, finding 75 patterns for visualizations. I organized them by question on an internal site, adding guidance about personas, data and analytics, organizational maturity, and measuring design outcomes.
Results
Cross-functional teams on multiple products used my materials to accelerate workshopping and developer specs. I designed an IBM executive training curriculum and piloted it with two teams beyond Watson Health, leading a corporate IBM education team to include the topics in a course.
Context
Our Design Team redesigned the Health Insights dashboards as the dashboards were reimplemented in a new Business Intelligence (BI) tool.
Because the Analysts who would be customizing the out-of-box dashboards for our clients were not BI programmers, our cross-functional product team kept the dashboard coding simple, at the expense of some slicker visual design. Our Product Director questioned whether the resulting dashboards had enough "Wow."
My role
I had 3-5 days to respond to the Product Director's question, working alone. I researched state-of-the-art dashboard design, including competitors, designs shared online and cited in "best of" articles, and real-life examples showing our BI tool's visual design possibilities.
I identified what I liked and disliked about each dashboard I curated. I synthesized the strongest characteristics into three coherent "makeovers" of one of our dashboards. I shared my findings with the cross-functional team..
Results
Given this information, the Product Director was satisfied and ultimately agreed with our approach. I was able to use one of the three makeover options to accelerate a Health Equity dashboard design project.