Baseline Dashboard

Baseline Dashboard

Keep users informed on what is happening and tell stories with data

Dashboard is another key element of the Baseline app. It, being the first thing a user sees when first logged into the app, needs to provide just the right amount of information for the user to know what is going on at work and what needs to be done and the urgency of the matters. It also needs to tell insightful stories with the data being collected about the teams and company in order to empower a manager or executive level user to make well-informed business decisions. And there needs to be a balance between the immediately actionable updates and business insights. With all these in mind, I started out with finding the best visuals to answer all these different questions.

How is the whole company doing overall?

This is the question that is often asked by executive level users, such as the CFO and CEO in the case of our client. To answer this question, I decided to go with a few different charts to summarize how the company is doing in terms of sales, project status, average capacity of employees, and project cost. This is a pretty quick and easy way for executive users to have a glance and get an idea of the current status of the entire organization in the key aspects.

How are the departments doing in terms of capacity? How is employee work health and who is over capacity?

Department health is a topic of concern for many of our users, and when looking at department health, the most important thing that people want to know is whether employees in this department are having enough capacity. To show that, I used a bar chart to show the average department occupancy and the part that is over the limit will be marked red and if a department’s average occupancy is way below the limit then it will be marked yellow. Meanwhile, different people look at department health from different scope. An HR person will want to know the health of all departments at the moment and in the future so they can be in touch with department heads and managers to reallocate work or work on recruiting new people for certain departments. A department head will mostly be concerned with the stats of his/her own department but from past to future to see the trend and see more details on who is most occupied within the department. On the other hand, an executive user will want to see health stats of all departments across the year to see trends of departments being busy or less occupied at different times of the year. To allow this flexibility and granularity, I made visuals for the department health stats at different granularity. At the highest level, it is a heat map of all departments across the year, and clicking on each month of the year or the department will lead to the bar chart of that month or that department respectively. At the most granular level, a bar chart that shows the occupancy status of a department for a specific month and the people who are over capacity will be shown.

What kind of skills do clients for?

From our conversation with the users, we learned that one thing they really hope to be able to tell is how clients are spending on the service or talents that they are providing and this information will help them in making a lot of important decisions when planning out the future. In order to answer this question, I used an area map to best visualize this information. Since each project will have tags on what skills are required, the best way to tell what skills clients are paying for is to map the skills needed in a sold project to the sales that the skill brought to the company, in short, how much sales is associated with a skill.

What do I need to attend to and what should I know?

Another one of the biggest problems faced by our users in their daily work is that there is no shared knowledge of what is happening across the organization. To make the information more visible and well communicated across different teams, there needs to be a well-designed notification system. When designing for the notifications for this app, we realized there are 2 different types of notifications: actions and notices. Actions are things that are usually of higher priority and need the user’s to attend to whereas notices keep the user informed of an update in anything that this user is associated with. The separation of the types of notifications keep users well informed while also creating a sense of priority and urgency among everything that happens within the organization.

Dashboard for different users

After designing the visuals that help answer the questions that users are most keen to know from their dashboard, the next thing is to assemble the most suitable dashboard with the visuals for different user types according to their daily work.