Dynamic Reports

Designed dynamic reports with data visualizations that enabled further drill-downs and highlighted key data for quick insights.

Problem

1. Existing reports were not valuable

Without the completion of our design system, we had to use some of our previous components to create MVP reports that would go out to beta customers. These reports lacked any additional capability to drill further down into report data, and with the small amount of data readily available with this new product, the reports fell flat.

A report with filters using older design library components — First iteration of risk reports using older design components

2. PowerBI reports needed a lot of customization

Due to the lack of customization options for PowerBI tables and filters out of the box, I had to push engineering to conduct spikes to determine the extent of possible customizations, the necessity of plug-ins, and the time required to achieve our target state for the reports. My requirements for tables in reporting significantly influenced the features needed in the new design system, leading to several months of collaboration with stakeholders to reach an ideal state. Even then, I had to work closely with engineers to see how well they could implement the proposed designs, ultimately discovering the need to create custom PowerBI components.

Initial PowerBI reports with filters and data visualizations before customization — PowerBI reports before creating custom components to match our design system

3. Filters did not work as envisioned

Due to some constraints within PowerBI, we were not able to get our filter panel to expand and collapse out of view or add chips to provide additional visibility to filter selections. These original designs would have afforded users the ability to not only see their selections but also remove them without expanding each filter again.

Problem Statement

How might we add value to risk reports by utilizing PowerBI to make our reports dynamic, enabling drill down of data through filters and data visualizations?

Proposed Solution

My designs offered a way for users to hide and show columns, search data, and filter report data through filters and data visualizations. Users could click on a graph above the table, and the data in the table would update to reflect this new filtered view. This added new functionality to our reports and gave users the ability to quickly drill down information or simply view a summary of important data points.

For the first set of reports, we decided to create three reports that captured many data points on policy status and employee attestation status that could be narrowed down to focus on whatever was relevant to the user. These reports were instrumental in paving the road for the future expansion of risk reporting into other areas, as well as the future of our reporting tools across the platform, and will serve as a template for them as we transition them into PowerBI in the future.

Findings & Next Steps

The next steps for this project would be to tag and track filters and other new components in Pendo to see how they are performing. This data will be critical for other areas in the platform that will eventually utilize these same components. Additionally, these reports will be the first ones built in the target state that will go live to customers. We will also need to speak with beta customers to gather feedback on how these reports meet their needs. If all goes well, these findings will validate our hypothesis that these report improvements add significant value to users and increase our customers.

Lastly, we plan to further leverage PowerBI's capabilities by establishing risk monitoring trends that will automate insights and suggestions provided to our users based on report findings.

Background

Last year, I began working on a new product line at the company, introducing policy, incident, regulatory, and risk management as part of our compliance suite. These designs were ahead of our new design system's completion, resulting in a unique evolution and requiring extensive problem-solving.

We needed a reporting solution that would break the mold of our standard reporting and serve as a template for future reporting. In the first phase, we created a list of reports displaying policy compliance data, intending to expand these in the future. However, beta customers found our basic reports insufficient, which was problematic since reports were a major selling point for compliance.

To enhance the value of our reports, we migrated them to PowerBI (PBI) to leverage its data handling capabilities. This required significant effort from our engineers to learn the new software, but ultimately, I designed dynamic reports that we hoped would meet our customers' needs and would make PBI reports more user-friendly.

Stakeholders

Product Manager, Software Engineers, Test Engineers, UX Researcher, UX Designers

Role

Lead UX Designer