At Get Invited, we are continuously striving to create the best possible experience for our users. This means that, whilst we are constantly building and shipping new features, we are conscious not to neglect the existing product.
A few months ago, we decided that our dashboard user interface needed some care and attention, to reduce the visual complexity and lessen any potential confusion.
Note: Digital products shouldn’t require users to invest lots of time learning how something works, or have them hunt around to find certain features!
If you look at the older version of the dashboard (above), it’s not horrible, but it packs a lot of information onto the screen. Events and all their associated information are bundled together, which is fine when you only have a few events, but when you are running multiple events it quickly becomes overwhelming and hard to digest, not the experience we want for our customers.
Note: Displaying too much on the screen at any given time results in confusion, elements battle for superiority and when we’re given too much choice we become overwhelmed.
Our goal with the redesign was to simplify what information and options we present to users on each screen.
It’s well known that we have limited capacity for storing and processing information in our short term memory, known as Cognitive Load. Therefore we should consider what information is vital for the user, and what can be hidden away and revealed later at their request.
Redesigning a product gives us the opportunity to refine and tweak not only the visual aesthetics of the product but ensure that people have a good experience using the product.
Note: A redesign should never just be a visual update, you should be spending the time to consider how your users will be interacting with your designs.
Displaying new information or adding new options to this previous layout became a much bigger task than it should have been, we struggled to find an ideal place to put new features or information and ended up reworking or hacking the layout each time. This was a clear indication that the layout was close to its breaking point because it was causing headaches for both us and the customer.
We needed a layout which provided a quick overview of the events, but also allowed the event organiser to delve deeper and see the finer details about their event, such as statistics on their ticket sales, social media statistics and options to manage their event. We didn’t want to bombard the event organiser with data, we wanted to let them see more detail when they choose to.
So, our solution was to split the layout in two; one to display a quick overview of all events and the other to give much more in depth stats about how a particular event is doing, and ultimately offer a much better experience for our users.
Our new Dashboard is simple and concentrates on removing the distracting elements from the existing design and making these accessible when required. We wanted to keep this page very lean to provide a quick overview of events and if an event organiser wants more detail they can click into that specific event.
Our individual event pages provide statistics about ticket sales, event page views, attendee checkins, social activity and in the not too distant future, sentiment analysis of what people are saying about the event. The page is split into standalone components or modules, which display specific details. These details are separated to make them easy to digest and eventually will allow the event organiser to customise and reorder the components to best suit their needs.
Whilst redesigning the admin interface, we also managed to resolve a technical issue where multiple social graphs on the same page resulted in a very sluggish page load. We could have come up with a technical solution to fix this, but thankfully our new design direction meant we no longer had multiple graphs on the same page, resulting in a happy developer and a much quicker page load!
Note: It’s important every once in a while to take a break from shipping new features and have a look at the current state of your product, check that everything work as well as it used to, and figure out if you to need to rework some areas.
