Product Design • Web
Dash Hudson is a visual marketing software that the world’s largest brands use including Apple, Amazon, and Kylie Cosmetics. They use our software daily to create, measure, predict and publish photos and videos. As well as see trends, analyze, and enhance performance across organic, paid, and e-commerce marketing channels.
Pre-Covid, Dash Hudson was focused primarily on solutions for Instagram and Pinterest but with Covid impacting businesses and cutting budgets, brands needed a single software solution for all of their social platforms.
Facebook is a channel that many of our brands still leverage to engage their audiences and generate traffic/conversions. For some brands, depending on their audience demographic, it is a KEY channel for driving traffic to their product/content pages.
Most of Dash Hudson’s brands right now rely on native Facebook analytics, which are not user-friendly, and time-consuming to use.
The other opportunity with this project was to improve internal processes and improve collaboration between Product Managers and Designers.
I partnered with the Product Manager and Engineering Manager to tackle the research and understand the problem. We wanted to make sure what we were going to build would actually solve customers needs. We researched how nine of our competitors were providing solutions for Facebook analytics noting the metrics provided, usability, and features included.
We then reviewed feedback provided by customers and had discovery calls with customers who had requested Facebook analytics. We learned that they have two main concerns:
Understanding their Page performance at a glance
Fan Growth, Total Engagements, Engagement Rate, Page Reach, Impressions
Analyzing their top & bottom performing posts
We knew that our solution needed to be easier to use and understand than Facebook’s native analytics. We wanted to prove that by starting small and keeping the key problem in mind, we could provide something truly great for our customers and to do that, we prioritized customer’s biggest needs first.
We put together wireframes using InVision Freehand. The goal for the project was to design a single customizable dashboard with all of the most important metrics and information brands needed.
Once we were aligned on the wireframes, I turned those into hifi designs and an InVision prototype.
It wasn’t part of Dash Hudson’s process to conduct user testing sessions so I put together a presentation for the CEO, CTO, Lead Designer and Product Management team, explaining what user testing is and why it’s important and advocated for it to become part of our process moving forward. I was given the green light and Facebook analytics became the first project to include user testing.
Once we had the InVision prototype ready, I put together a test script (a series of questions and tasks to ask each user testing participant to keep testing sessions consistent) and we reached out to five brands who had previously requested Facebook Analytics.
All of the brands responded to us within the same day and we set up five 30 minute Zoom calls with the customer, the Product Manager, the Customer Success Representative and myself, who lead the calls.
During the sessions, we learned about their current process for reviewing their Facebook analytics, dug into what they like and don’t like with Facebook Native Analytics and had them walk through our prototype.
Overall, the feedback was extremely positive. There were only two areas that needed improvements. Users didn’t interact with the second metrics graph and a few struggled with changing the sorting order of top posts from highest to lowest -> lowest to highest.
100% of participants commented on the look & feel of the dashboard saying that it was very easy to digest the information.
100% of participants immediately commented positively on the topline metrics saying that they loved that they didn’t have to click into anything to get all of the metrics they need.
60% of participants said the dashboard would completely replace the other tools they are currently using for analytics.
60% of participants said the top/bottom posts were the most valuable part of the dashboard along with the topline metrics.
Listening to our customer’s feedback, we added Effectiveness to the topline stats, a call to action using Product Tours for the second graph, and changed the title of “Top Posts” to “Top Performing Posts” and “Lowest Performing Posts”. We also removed paid metrics from the MVP after discussing with the tech lead and learning about the complexities of paid metrics with Facebook’s API.
During implementation, a discussion came up with the dev team about “how many loading spinners are too many loading spinners?”. If we had gone with the design practices already in place in the platform that would have meant we would have had 4 loading spinners on the screen at once. We wanted to come up with a better solution.
Because this project was streamlined to a single dashboard, we were able to introduce skeleton loading as part of the scope for this project. Skeleton loading is now being implemented product wide.
The Facebook analytics dashboard launched for customers in October 2020 and we immediately received positive feedback and feature requests to expand on the Facebook product. In December 2020 we launched a similar solution for Twitter and are going to be updating the current Instagram to reflect what was done for Facebook as well.
The biggest win, however, was that the Facebook Analytics project provided me and my product team with an opportunity to completely change the way product gets built at Dash Hudson. We transitioned from a process that was siloed, risky, and waterfall to collaborative, iterative, and user-tested. This improvement ensured that we were solving the right problems with the right solutions that we could build upon.
Marketing visuals by Becky Ryan, Marketing Design Manager at Dash Hudson.
