AboutIn the Lab

Metric Report Builder

COMPANY:

LogicGate, 2022

Summary

I focused on enhancing our Metric Report builder to give business users the ability to create and display metrics from using their quantitative data in their Risk Programs.

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User Problems and Current Limitations

Our Metric Report builder did not do enough. 

Metric reports were designed to give users the ability to summarize the activity of their risk program succinctly in their Dashboards. However, there was a severe limitation in functionality. It could only count number or percentage of records that matched a given query. Users could, for example display:

  • the number of records that were high risk
  • the percentage of vendors that were owned by a particular co-worker.

Unfortunately there was no way to display these types of metrics:   

  • the total financial loss in 2019 due to IT related incidents.
  • the average risk score by business department in 2020.

Users wanted to display metrics derived from the numeric values stored within their records.

USer FLow

Integrating the new with the old

When designing the metric report builder, it was important to preserve the pre-existing flows that our users were familiar with. In doing so, users learning the new flow could leverage their intuition of previous patterns to the new enhancements.

New metric report builder flow.

The user flows diverged when users chose between reporting on “Numeric Values” and“Record Count”. Choosing "Numeric Values" would then surface a new set of configuration settings, including calculations and precision settings.

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DIVing deeper

Design Details

Slicing data by multiple field values 1

Previously, users were only allowed to slice by one field value in our metric reports. This was an unnecessary constraint for our users. We changed this component to a multi-select, allowing users to visualize metrics that fulfilled more than property.

New Calculation Options 2

Initially, the only required calculation option on the design ticket was for sums. Thinking more on how business users might aggregate their metrics, I decided to add more calculation options. I ended up landing on Sum, Average, Minimum, Maximum, and Medians.

Display Settings 3

Metrics require more or less precision depending on the use case and who the audience is. When designing the display settings, we aimed to supply a set of options that allowed our users to represent their metric to their desired accuracy. 

Help Text 4

We knew that there was significant user sentiment that our reporting tools were challenging to use. This wasn’t surprising, given the lack of guidance and ambiguity our interface elements had. We considered implementing action-based onboarding patterns, but we didn’t have the technical components. As a stopgap, we refreshed our configuration interface to include guidance text. Whether you were a new user or a returning user needing to refresh themself with the UI, this help text would serve as their guidance. 

Reflection

Upon release, our customer success team was quick to adopt this new functionality when they were demoing to both prospective and existing customers. Currently, we have been monitoring adoption metrics to gain an understanding of customer usage, and inform the next phase of design development. 

While these new options make for a more robust reporting experience in our platform, our holistic reporting still has yet to be a tool that is approachable from all customers. I’d love to continue exploring how to better design for guidance in our platform so that our reporting tools  can be used more powerfully in the future.