saas Architectural Dashboard

In product design, having a well-defined strategy is essential. Developing a product design strategy starts with understanding the users and what they need from the product. Strategic product design is focused on connecting design thinking to business value and can be considered as a framework that helps us understand the users, define product goals, and build the right features.

My roles within creating a dashboard for architects were included a strong product design strategy and are listed below:

Defining the vision The goals and objectives regarding the project were already established prior to my involvement. The dashboard to be created were to cover every possible needs of an architect as well as partnerships between stakeholders and brands therefore be used as a platform to create business relationships as well.

Research and discovery What to build to reach that vision? It is important to understand the customer and their needs. Luckily I am a Faculty of Architecture graduate myself. In the discovery phase, the insights gleaned here helped me to identify user behavior and habits, the pain points they have with existing products, and common goals they share.

User personas for target users It is important to create those ideal customers to finish up the user research part. The persona I have created demonstrates real user patterns, focuses on an existing product state and has a clearly defined context for each use case.

Differentiation of the product According to the famous Jakob's Law, users tend to use other web sites rather than yours. So it is important to understand design philosophies of what products our target customers use at the moment. Everyone wants to offer something more valuable but we should have a through understanding of why the competitors took the approach they did.

Validate the strategy At this stage, I have already begun to ideate solutions. I have built countless prototypes and got them in front of users early and often. The feedback from users are valuable in order to iterate my design. After multiple iterations (still an ongoing process) I realized the product design framework we follow is quite fluid, it is important to deal with ambiguity in a good manner as taking new paths as the feedback reveals is inevitable.

Here is what I did and still doing at my current work. Below is the re-design of the current dashboard we're creating. Final product offers more than 50 modules that the architects might use within a project life cycle and each module comes with its own challenges to overcome. One of the most important challenge was the: 

Design system At the early stages of vision defining I have realized that the tools and modules to be created were to built the same way in the means of design. So as the product grows, I have slowly built a design system to replicate designs quickly by utilizing pre-made UI components and elements. There is no need to reinvent the wheel and thus to risk unintended inconsistency. I have followed an 'Atomic Design' methodology and built atoms, molecules and organisms to create the principles as well as the toolkit.

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