Warner Music Group
BTS Dashboard
Agency: In-House
Role: Lead UX/UI Designer
01/ The Opportunity
Create a tool utilizing already captured data to streamline business processes
Jira (a project management tool) manages soley on a per project basis, with everything being seperate. But what happens when you have an organization with 30-40 project streams going on concurrently? Do you have to individual view each project and remember everything at a glance? Is there no way for comparison utilizing all the data that was being logged on a daily basis?
The BTS Dashboard project was initiated to build an extension onto the current system that is used for company's IT project management. I realized that all the data that we needed to build a dashboard to show the data visualization was available, Atlassian just hadn't tapped into the overall potential power of JIRA.
By utilizing the power of rest.api's and JSON, we were able to automate all the inputed data into an organized and coherent, 3 tier data system. This allowed executives and business leaders to easily allocate resources, track project statuses, reconcile budgets and manage the overall business portfolio in real-time. The time for monthly invoices and spreadsheets was over.
02/ Discovery
Whiteboarding
Sitemap and IA
I began Interviewing different people around the office (of all levels) to gather information about how they would use a tool like this. To my surprise there was more interest in it than I had anticipated. PMs loved the tool also and asked if we could make it detailed enough so that it was still usable from a project level.
I constructed the architecture into a 3 Level System. It consisted of portfolio, programs and project detail. This allowed everyone from the CEO to a project manager to have value in this system.
Since the information we were getting was from project level, in its most granular detail, the plan was to then roll it up in programs and then roll programs up the portfolio view.
Sitemap and IA
03/ Design
The Process
We used an agile development methodology to bring this dashboard to life. As I designed, Tim was busy building the UI and we had another two back-end developers writing custom APIs that fed the data.
In total the project took 18 sprints (two weeks each). We would release one module about every 3-4 sprints, test, reiterate and keep moving.
Because I was the sole product designer on the project, I opted to skip a wire framing phase. Instead I gradually built up the fidelity in the designs over time. Every sprint they got cleaner and sharper until they were finalized.
The Evolution
Over time while iterating we made many changes. Colors were changed, type treatments were change. Functionality went through many tests and tweaks. Here are some pages in time sequence from left to right.
Final Designs
Over the course of a year, we developed 6 Modules, all with unique functionalities. There was Status, Resources, Budget, Issues & Risks, Roadmap, and a master project list that served as a project overview.
All of these individual modules pulled from the live data that were being entered in JIRA. Built solely on JOSN feeds to APIs, no backend service was ever needed to execute this dashboard.
These designs are scrubbed of any real data for security reasons.