Unified dashboard builder
Drag and drop to build powerful, federated analytics dashboards by seamlessly integrating data from CRMs, HelpDesk, Telephony, and more — all in one place.
- Product designer
- Research & discovery
- UX strategy & planning
- UI/UX design
- Interaction design
- Data visualization
Data and analytics are integral to the workflows of nearly every team across various industries. Dashboards provide meaning and actionability to this data, helping teams make sense of it and draw valuable insights. Every database-centric tool features some form of analytics dashboard. Ringover, for instance, offers a comprehensive product dedicated to dashboard analytics for its clients. In organizations where cross-functional projects are common, teams interact and share data frequently. Each team has its own data and corresponding dashboard to interpret it. However, employees often find themselves switching between different dashboards, struggling to understand those that seem unfamiliar. Nevertheless, the work continues, and so does the sharing of data.
Teams manage too many integrations (CRMs, Helpdesk, Telephony, BYOD), each generating separate dashboards, leading to scattered insights. How do we effectively analyze such a vast amount of information?
Constantly switching between dashboards or exporting data for manual analysis slows down decision-making.
Different tools that provide analytics have their own learning curves which sometimes takes too long to learn.
The Unified Dashboard project is still actively ongoing. Given the project's large scope, we decided to break it down into phases. For the first phase, we focused on building a custom drag-and-drop dashboard builder with pre-made widgets. This was a significant challenge, involving continuous discussions with developers, frequent returns to the drawing board, and working through multiple iterations.
I collaborated closely with the development team, researching best practices in data visualization and preparing a list of widgets we would initially support. Following this, I designed the interactions for each widget and defined the UI rules and playground restrictions for the builder to streamline development.
From there, we moved into integrating Ringover’s native dashboard capabilities into this new builder, enabling clients to seamlessly create different dashboards for different use cases instead of relying on a single, consolidated data pool.
The next phase involved building support for integrations — allowing users to import data from multiple external sources and pick and choose data points from any of them to create comprehensive, cross-integration dashboards. To achieve this, we first developed a formula builder, empowering users to manipulate raw data and generate actionable insights. Users could then apply these custom formulas to fully customizable widgets to build cross-platform dashboards that were not just comprehensive, but also insight-driven and actionable.
Now, let’s walk through my highlights from the project so far.
Research & Visualization Standards : Collaborated with developers to research and establish best practices for data visualization and widget design. Together, we set up the drag-and-drop interface and defined the parameters for the widget's layout and construction.
Interaction and UX Design : Designed intuitive drag-and-drop interactions, widget behaviors, and rules for the dashboard playground to ensure a smooth user experience.
Integrating the Ringover dashboard : Set up a widget library to integrate Ringover’s existing widgets and filters that allows users to create multiple, flexible dashboards with data of their choosing.
Adding Salesforce and Zendesk integrations : In integration dashboards users could use the data from their connected platforms. When creating a new dashboard users could choose whether to user their existing Ringover data or data from these integrations. Currently the scope is limited to Salesforce and Zendesk.
Data source set-up : A quick and easy set-up process to ingest data from the connected sources. Sign in with to your integration of choice and import data.
Formula Builder for cross-platform Insights : To enable deeper insights, we introduced a formula builder. Formulas lets users combine and manipulate data from different sources to create new, comprehensive data points for better insights. For example, users could correlate the number of support tickets raised in Zendesk with call activity from Salesforce.
Improved Widget Library for Visualization : A curated list of enhanced widgets to help visualize the data. These widgets would be available while building the dashboard.
Simple and Customizable Widget Setup : Setting up a widget is easy and quick — users simply select a formula to populate it. Additional settings are available for those who want to further customize the widget’s appearance or behavior.
- The tool is currently under development, with plans to advance to the next phase, which involves integrating Ringover with various data sources to create dashboards with enhanced capabilities.
- We also aim to develop widget and formula templates to improve the dashboard creation experience.
- One of the challenges we face is establishing global filters for the dashboards. While it is possible to filter individual data points when creating formulas, the complexity arises when these formulas are applied to widgets. Since different widgets utilize different formulas, each composed of data points from various sources, it becomes challenging to put together a comprehensive list of global filters. Even if such a list were dynamic, it would still be difficult for users to grasp the effect of applying a specific filter across multiple widgets.
- Additionally, we planning to incorporate AI to assist in generating formulas, filters, and dashboards.
- Working on this project have been fun and challenging. Building a custom drag-and-drop dashboard helped me to understand how to balance freedom and restriction for users to help improve their experience.
- The developers faced many challenged throughout this project so far. Collaborating with them helped me to improve my decision making process especially when trying to align user experience with technical feasibility.