GOAL
To modernize the Insights app and make data visualizations more digestible for our customers, so they can more easily gather the analytics they need.
PROJECT
Insights Revisualization
CLIENT
Kapost
PROJECT SUMMARY
The Kapost Insights product was meant to give users analytics and insights into their content strategy, production and performance, but was out-of-date and under-utilized due to the lack of useful data and the usability issues that the current product presented.
THE ORIGINAL PRODUCT
I started working with the Insights Product Manager at the inception of this redesign idea in early 2016 to whiteboard potential concepts for the charts we had and the new charts we wanted to build. We discussed and identified the questions that users were trying to answer about their content in Kapost and how those should be organized, and from there, I came up with the data visualizations that could answer those questions in intuitive ways.
After our brainstorming sessions concluded, I spent time creating flows and low-fidelity design screens for each of the “tabs” (categories) that the PM and I had identified together. Once we felt confident in our first draft, we presented everything to the project stakeholders (CTO, Director of Product, Director of Design, Lead Insights Engineer, and more) and started iterating on and narrowing down the chart options and design direction from their feedback.
Around this point in time (July 2016), I was transitioning over from UX Designer to Product Owner. This enabled me to take this project from the early brainstorming stages all the way to its release, so it holds a special place in my heart. Balancing both Design and Product roles for two different teams, I continued leading the design process through high-fidelity mock-ups and final approval, and then switched over to working with our Lead Developer to plan out the development sprints for this project.
Together, we outlined the entire project from a development point of view and organized the best way for the team to approach it. We created an order of operations with sprints and milestones (checkpoints for finishing project features), which enabled us to commit to a rough timeline for delivery, and then I took those milestones and broke them down further into digestible stories in Jira. From there, I was in charge of running the team’s backlog grooming, where we reviewed and discussed the stories that I wrote for the upcoming sprint as a team, edited them as needed and pointed them. Then during the sprints, I was the point of contact for any design and functionality questions and decisions, and performed manual QA to accept or reject each story that was delivered.
This was a large project that took close to a year, and myself and our entire team were very proud of what we created. The feature was officially released in January 2017, and the usage of the Insights product went up by more than 230% in the following two months. Below is a preview of the end result of the product.