Ally Noormohamed

My Role

I researched, defined, designed and tested the feature and supported the development team in delivering it.

Problem

Customers need to know what is happening with their visitors and understand their visitor data better. Using information such as the number of visitors, when they visit, and what offices they are visiting enables companies to plan staffing and resources accordingly. Additionally, they need to be able to access this information quickly and easily for security and compliance reasons in the event of an incident or during an audit.

The product's current reporting and analytics capabilities are limited, difficult to find, and often accomplished by simply exporting the visitor data to be analyzed in another system. Although that is a crucial requirement, not all companies have external tools and skills to analyze data in that way.

Better reporting and analytics is a common feature request from customers; not having this feature results in customer churn. In addition, competitors provide better standard reporting capabilities, contributing to losing new sales opportunities.

Discovery

The product manager and I analyzed our competitor's products to understand how they shaped their reporting capabilities.

Next, we identified our target personas for the feature and set up interviews with them to validate the problem.

We learned that users have limited time because they have many responsibilities that differ daily. For example, they handled everything from compliance and security to health and safety for one or more offices. In addition, their duties include providing reports for oversight on compliance and visibility of systems to other departments and their leadership teams.

As a result, they spend several hours each week on the analysis, depending on their skills. Their analysis identifies trends, anomalies, and missing visitor and incident data gaps, using data exported from our product and incident management systems.

Using these insights, the product manager, development lead, and I planned which reports we'd build and how, and I documented the users' tasks.

Solution

I used our information structure to define a framework and interaction model to design reports that users could modify and save as custom reports. This model would reduce our development effort to generate a report for every variation a user needs, which our competitors don't have.

Then I developed some concepts with the product manager and development lead. Next, I tested and revised the designs using usability testing. Finally, I used the artifacts I created, including mockups, to communicate the design vision to our team.

At the same time, we worked with the development lead to investigate a technical solution.

Results

Despite some delays due to team members leaving the company and unforeseen technical challenges, we shipped the feature in 2022, creating new sales opportunities and preventing six enterprise customers from churning.

Based on business priorities and customer feedback, we are figuring out what to build next.