KP

Research

While an analytics dashboard seems like a pretty straightforward thing to build, Sherpa had a lot to catch up on when I picked up this project. Sherpa’s professional services team was hand-curating custom reports to clients monthly and it was time to put those tools in the hands of our users. I interviewed many high-profile users to find out what their priorities were in terms of getting what they need out of analytics.

During interviews, I employed some first-draft wireframes to get early feedback on the UI I had in mind, asked detailed questions about their reports and workflows, and used a virtual card-sorting exercise to find trends in most valuable KPIs to Sherpa’s clients.

User Interface

Research showed that while everyone’s reports looked slightly different, the most valuable thing to people was the most basic statistic: how many people viewed and who are they? For the first phase, I spent most of my time creating a report page around viewing analytics where users could filter and configure the report through the UI, exporting the final version to PDF or XLSX where they could manipulated the data further.

Adding Value

Shown above is an atypical chart for user funnels. It was inspired by Google Analytic’s behavior chart, but built for a live video workflow. I built this Sankey diagram in response to the need to see the audience breakdown between live and on-demand views and it evolved into much more. If a user is interested in content, they would register to see the live event, more interested is viewing the live event, and even more interested is watching the event on-demand after it has ended. With the analytics shown in this chart (actual numbers and values displayed on hover), a content creator can draw conclusions about when to schedule an event, who is most engaged in an event, or test different content to convert more page impressions to views.