An internal dashboard designed for the future

Imagine a dashboard built to be your team’s go-to hub for tracking key stats and streamlining routine tasks.

That was the goal behind the Renaissance dashboard, with future plans to launch as a SaaS product for music labels and artists.

The dashboard on a gradient purple, pink and white background with a large purple arrow and different dashvbard elements floating around

Project Overview

My Role

Sole researcher, UX and UI designer

Timeline

3 months from discovery to handoff

Team

1 product manager
2 engineers
and myself

Key outcome

Saved the team roughly 5 hours a week on routine tasks like report creation, compiling analytics, and choosing reward winners.

The original design

I initially conducted a heuristic analysis, which gave me a great jumping-off point. I found issues around inconsistency e.g. button namings and the structure of the dashboard.

Original dashboard

After speaking with the team, a few themes emerged:

Navigation didn’t feel intuitive - Features weren’t where users expected, making it difficult to find what they needed.
Missing functionality - The team had a wishlist of features, like scaling images and previewing a streaming party before it went live in the app.
Stats, stats, and MORE STATS! The analytics tab on the dashboard is empty, but it would be amazing to track party and rewards performance. Right now, we manually create reports. I get stats from the devs and build the report in Figma. Why not streamline this?

Ideating what’s possible and feasible

Before sketching, a competitor analysis helped me see alternative solutions to pain points the team had.

Due to the nature of this being an internal product, it was hard to get access to similar dashboards, so I looked further afield to management tools and music dashboards like Spotify for Artists.

Testing the flow

After creating a prototype, it was time to test the new design with the team. I tailored the scenarios to the teams day-to-day tasks.

For the most part, the team didn’t struggle with the tasks, however it did highlight a few issues, especially around pop ups.

The problem:

Some team members edited a party but clicked off the screen instead of saving, which was super frustrating because they had to redo the whole process.

The solution:

I added an 'x’ button in the corner and removed the ability to click off the modal to exit. After feedback, I also made it possible to edit the streaming goal.

Before and after of the edit streaming party modal

Passing the vibe check

Time to give the team what they deserve, a stylish dashboard that’s both accessible and fun.

I wanted the team to have a say in the design, so I created three style options, each with different nav bars and color schemes. To gather their input, I ran a preference test.

There was a clear winner, but most of the team preferred a thinner nav bar from one of the other options. So, I combined the best of both in the final design.

The final design

Designing the dashboard with the team was an absolute joy. I truly appreciate all the feedback, the time everyone took to be part of the research process, and the amazing collaboration with my managers and the devs.