My Experience with Portal Technologies: Improving a Dashboard's Usability
In March 2022 I had my first collaboration as a freelance. I worked with Portal Technologies, an Italian startup that uses an AI to predict customers flow in stores and to manage staff. Their product is a software, mostly used by store managers, connected to a device that is installed inside the shop.
This AI software calculates forecasts and gives real time previsions; for example it estimates how many people are going to visit the store in the next hours and in the coming days, and it estimates how many employees will be needed each day. It also provides data like how many people are currently inside the store, and it is designed for big chains of stores helping them to compare the performance of the various points of sale.
MY ROLE was to find solutions to a series of problems that were negatively affecting the overall UX of the dashboard.
The product had already been launched but it was still in an early stage.
The home dashboard I designed
Translated in English
Improvements and problems solved
I worked a lot on simplifying the interface; originally, the design particularly burdened the user's cognitive load and did not, in my opinion, take into account the user's needs, the context of use, and the hierarchy of information.
The team, originally, had included in the home dashboard a section called "compare cities/countries"; it was a big map of the world with a search bar that lets users choose the data (as tags) that are shown in a very large tab under the map (the more data they select the larger the tab becomes). For “cities/countries” they mean the points of sale around the world.
I proposed of naming it "compare points of sale", to exclude it from the home dashboard, and to integrate it as a button in the side section where, by default is selected the user's relevant store, and if someone, like a higher manager, wants to compare two or more stores, can select them and click on the button.
I have placed the estimated flows/hour above, more in the foreground than they were originally (down in the page), because I think it is an info that the user wants to have more immediately and that they probably consult several times during the day. I made it slightly larger, reducing the weather section to the current day and putting a button to consult the weather for the entire week.
I made sure to give consistency between the section names "visits last week" and "next week's visits forecast" to highlight their correlation.
I changed the way they are represented graphically, I think it is more fluid and pleasant and that the information comes more direct, not having the user to go up and down with the mouse. In fact, in the UI that they gave me to work on, these two sections were not designed with vertical columns, but with horizontal lines, very thin and long, and near to each other, and you weren’t able to watch all of them at once, you had to scroll and you also had to continuously scan the interface from left to right. In this way I reduced the effort for the user’s eyes.
"Population" and "Average customers/hour" were originally in the analytics page. As you can see I placed them as the first two information of the summary, so to let users compare them with the underlying real-time data.
There was a lot of work to do on the UX writing side. Just to give you some examples, some terms were in Italian, other in English, without a criteria. So I left in English only the ones in the navbar, because more universal. I changed the word "people" with the more pertinent "customers".
I streamlined some parts that had a title and an explanation underneath by merging them, for example: “number of staff - how many employees work in the store” became more simply “number of employees in the store”.
I named “Today” the first section and I also positioned it higher. In addition, I have placed side by side in a single smaller section the percentage and the number of people both in the “today compared to yesterday” section and in the “ current week compared to last week” section in order to optimize space, also based on the position these sections occupy in the hierarchy of information.
I have rearranged horizontally the elements that make up the staff manager, to provide a simpler and more immediate use than the previous vertical arrangement, in which each element occupied a disproportioned space, and that forced the user to move too much along the interface. for the same reason I have placed side by side the two graphs of the workforce estimate.
