0-1 Dashboard Design
How we validated and sold the vision internally for a new homepage
Role: Lead Designer
Along with: Zack F. Product Manager, built by Max, Leo, and Rob
This is a quick snapshot of a months long endeavor to improve our home page, and eventually ship a dashboard (and a series of improvements thereafter). For access to the entire case study, message me on linkedin for the password.
+8%
Retention
+34%
Avg lift across all core actions
6 mo.
Timeline
Before
A design that served us well for years, but with a distracting banner up top that tried to do a lot (but accomplished very little – according to click through rates).
After
Phase 1: Quick improvements
We started with what we could accomplish in a two week dedicated sprint: does improving time to value impact retention? So we sought out to:
- Ruthlessly prioritize our two main actions into two highly visible CTAs: Create and Test
- Moved everything else into menus inside of these
- Made the UI *less* colorful to ensure our primary CTAs stood out
Before
Phase 1 After
Results were almost immediate – we rolled out to basic and plus trial users first, allowing us to run a true comparison test on the time to value. The impact on trial activation rate was net positive, which validated that focusing on improving the homepage and time to value was a worthy pursuit, and rolled out changes to all cohorts.
Phase 2 Dashboard
In our initial dashboard launch we had static empty states to ship faster. We then spent weeks testing empty states segmented by audience, usage, and plan to drive product adoption and retention.
Empty states that work
Results
We saw gains across the board on every single core product action, with at least a 13% lift on some actions, and up to 46% improvement on others. We spent the remainder of the year continuing to ship tests to push improvements and drive adoption.
Learnings
This was a super fun project because it was chunky (who doesn’t love a meaty problem to bite into), it had some resistance (I mean the in between MVPs looked BARE even though we were confident they would work), it required cross-functional planning (which meant cashing on the relationships I spent a year building) and I got to yap with my favorite team every single day at standup.
This project taught me how to sell a project up, how to run an effective ideation, how to do my own data analysis, and how to plan a roadmap that balances big bets and minor improvements.