Aperture Data Studio Dashboards

Aperture Data Studio is a data management and quality platform used across various industries. In 2020, Experian’s hackathon led to the creation of a dashboard feature that provides data analysts with a starting point and business consumers with tools to visualize data quality. This project gave executives a holistic view of their data without needing additional tools like Power BI and improved the homepage experience for all users, allowing them to drill down into their data. The dashboards, launched in 2021, have been well-received, enhancing overall data quality management.

What is Aperture Data Studio?

Aperture Data Studio is a data management and quality platform that is used by customers from a diverse range of industry sectors.

The beginning

In 2020, Experian ran a hackathon for local product and development teams. As part of that hackathon we created a proposal for a dashboard which could be used to give both a starting point for data analysts, but also act as a reporting tool to visualize data quality for business consumers. We did some quick internal user research to validate the need. We won the hackathon and was given budget to take the project further

Discovery

In order to validate the business requirements we interviewed a variety of customers and showed them some basic concepts. They all had a need to give their stakeholders a view on overall data quality improvements, which they were doing through a variety of third party tools which in themselves meant insecure data transfers and extra cost.

We did some desktop research to look at competitors and to validate some of our assumptions..

We also set to work in building and launching the Designer landing page which gave day to day users of the tool a place where they could pick up what they were last working on, and see an overview of other areas of the product. We would take the same framework to start to allow designers to then create their own.

Designs

Designs were mocked up for key user journeys in Figma. We then sat down with developers to see how we might get there. We broke the vision down into small incremental releases which looked a little like the following

- Allow the creation of charts
- Allow the user to modify their own dashboard
- Allow the user to create new dashboards with a mixture of charts and data grids
- Allow the user to share those dashboards for consumers to see

Testing

When we were deciding on the UI to create the dashboard using drag and drop widgets we had an initial prototype built in Figma. The prototype tested well with 5 users but there were various challenges such as expectations on what should happen to other widgets when dragging new widgets onto the dashboard. We adjusted the prototype and tested with another 5 users. This time the results were a lot better. We included development in all phases of testing. While some compromises still had to be met, we managed to launch dashboards to consumers in 2021 and still have many iterations of improvement left. Dashboards have been widely praised by internal stakeholders and customers and have managed to reduce some of the need for additional tools.

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