TIMTHIANTHAI
Supply Predictive Analytics Dashboards – Oil & Gas Company
One of SAP’s biggest customers contacted my team for design support. I took on the project due to my experience in analytics design and also because I wanted to challenge myself designing for a business domain of which I was not familiar—oil and gas. The objective was to design Supply Predictive Analytics dashboards to help business users make informed decisions for “downstream” sector, which involved processing, selling, and distributing oil and natural gas.
Consistent structure across all downstream dashboards (e.g. main filter on the left, visuals on the right) helped the user navigate through distinctive types of data with ease.
My Role
Lead Design
I was the only designer for this project. The customer already conducted in-house research before our engagement. My task was to design a consistent and flexible system across all dashboards and show how to apply specific requirements to each of them. The requirements and feedback were given remotely, as the customer was located in another state. The deliverables included high-fidelity mockups of all screens, design assets (e.g. icons), and visual specifications for development.
On a typical project day, the customer would send me the dashboard’s requirements via email, which could be visual at times if he had some ideas to share, followed by a brief call for clarification. My job was to make sense of them and design a coherent dashboard using the system that I already established.
Challenges & Takeaways
Abrupt Design Process
I’m usually involved with projects early on and participate in most steps of the design process (research, synthesis, ideation, etc.) This time, however, the requirements were often sent to me at random times with a one-day deadline. With this time crunch, my priority shifted from understanding every bit of detail to drilling down to what the user needed to see on screen and why. Regardless of the timeline, I would find time to ask my colleagues in the office for a quick design feedback, as it’s the most important part of my design approach.
Lack of User Access
Finding patterns among users helped pave my design. However, for this project, I was only given access to one business user for most dashboards. Often times, our communication also had to go through the customer’s development team due to their organizational structure. To ensure I received the right kind of feedback, I would ask a lot of “why” questions and filter out user insights from personal preferences.
Unfamiliar Tool
The required development tool for this project was SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio, which is an application for building executive dashboards. It has a lot of design potential, as well as limitations in data visualization. To make sure that the developers could build my design, I added a step to my design process: checking the possible visualizations from the library and deciding which would fit the use cases. After repeating the process a few times, I got the hang of it and found creative ways to show data with the seemingly limited tool.
I sometimes provided the business user with unfamiliar but viable data visualization options and got their feedback on which one they preferred and why. This helped me to better understand how they think.
Results
The customer’s developers built the dashboards using my design guidelines and specifications, and the project went live in 2015. Even though the customer was happy with the result and the turnover time, I still wonder what the design would look like if I was involved from the beginning of this project, had more time to learn the business domain, or was given access to more users during the process.
“The final product looks exceptional and feedback on all dashboards is very positive. It was great working with you.”
- The Oil and Gas Customer