Learn how to empower users with an intuitive and value-based dashboard.
Under the hood of any great SaaS product is a veritable sea of data full of potential insights, pain points, and pathways to success. However, without an intuitive and user-friendly dashboard, an abundance of metrics can quickly turn into information overload.
With a wealth of incredible options already available to businesses, having an easy-to-use and comprehensive SaaS dashboard is essential for thriving in the market. And because these dashboards serve as a hub for providing quick and reliable access to critical KPIs and organizational data, designing them requires deliberate consideration of what constitutes great UX.
To be truly effective, dashboards should not only benefit users by providing a clear view of essential metrics—they should also boost user satisfaction and engagement. Of course, to make a dashboard capable of enhancing experiences to that degree, you’ll need to think strategically about putting great UX front and center.
So, in today’s guide, we'll dive into the key principles, design strategies, and best practices for creating a dashboard for your SaaS product that excels at turning raw data into actionable insights.
Understanding user needs
Identifying target users and their goals
In order to give users a quick view of KPIs without time-consuming trips into the world of spreadsheets, filters, and formulas, your dashboard will need to be as relevant as possible to the people using it. User-centered design is at the crux of nearly all great UX, and surprise—SaaS dashboards are no different.
So, if you want to design a user-friendly dashboard, we recommend starting by understanding your users and their goals. You can go as granular as you need to, starting with target roles, responsibilities, and specific needs within the context of your software.
For example, while sales professionals and separate analytics teams may both want to see MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue), it’s likely that only analytics teams will need NPS (Net Promoter Score). While a decision like whether or not to include NPS might be a bit further down the road in dashboard development, it’s a tangible example of how different target users can impact dashboard elements and functionality.
Conducting user research and gathering feedback
Once you have a handle on the types of users who will be engaging with the dashboard, you can start digging even deeper into their needs. Methods such as surveys, interviews, and usability testing can provide valuable feedback that informs design decisions.
For example, qualitative interviews could teach you that many users of a particular SaaS product have difficulty with getting metrics that show year-over-year or longitudinal performance. Once you learn that, you can incorporate design features or tooltips to convey those kinds of comparisons. Failure to incorporate key features like that can balloon your churn rate. Instead, learn about these needs early on in the design process, or you’ll often miss the little things that users really crave.
Personas and user stories for dashboard design
Research can reveal clusters where demographic and behavioral data intersect to create meaningful groupings—also known as personas. For example, you may find that local managers tasked with producing a certain type of report need a specific format for data presentation, but that regional managers need different data and don’t use the same metrics for their KPIs. You may also find that within each group, you have power users who access dashboards more often and perform more sophisticated data analysis, as well as less active users.
Right there, you’ve already got four groups: local managers who are power users, local managers who aren’t, regional managers who are power users, and regional managers who aren’t. You can think of each as representing a persona: a helpful heuristic for conceptualizing what your users really look (and most importantly, act) like.
Once you’ve developed personas, you can begin imagining the journeys each group could take through your dashboard, even if it’s still a rough prototype. These hypothetical scenarios, also called user stories, let you bring personas to life by imagining concrete ways that each might use your product in real life. Ultimately, user stories are crucial because they provide behavioral insights about how different personas will interact with your product in unique ways, and how to anticipate potential pain points for each.
Principles of effective dashboard design
Simplicity and clarity
A well-designed dashboard should be simple and clear, presenting information in a way that is easy to understand at a glance. Avoid clutter and instead focus on essential data to prevent overwhelming users. Sometimes, the simplest visualization—even if it seems obvious or “boring”—is actually best.
Prioritize essential information and prevent information overload
There are many ways to pull data, but dashboards specialize in providing employees with a quick overview of metrics critical to individual job functions and/or broader organizational success. The research steps we outlined earlier can help by identifying the most critical information for your users, which you can then prioritize visually according to its level of importance.
In reality, a dashboard can’t possibly display every conceivable metric, especially if you want it stratified by other categories, date ranges, or compared to other groups. To keep things readable and responsive, you’ll have to limit the amount of information displayed at once to present data in a digestible format. However, for power users or more complex queries, progressive disclosure techniques can reveal additional details and functionality without cluttering the view.
4 key elements of a user-friendly SaaS dashboard
Data visualization
The real point of data visualization is to make insights from data more readily accessible. Dashboards turn rows and columns of data into meaningful charts, graphs, and indicators that are easier on the eyes and quicker to interpret.
It’s critical to choose the right visualization for the right data and for the right purpose. For example, you would want to use a line chart to plot data over time, but you might want to use a bar chart if you’re more interested in looking at differences between groups.
Navigation
Focusing on creating intuitive navigation paths within dashboards helps ensure that users can easily find and access different sections. Although what’s considered “intuitive” can be subjective and vary considerably between users, there are still some general principles you can adhere to, like:
Using navigation patterns that users are already familiar with, like lefthand navigation bars, “hamburger” menus, and tabbed pages.
Leveraging universally recognized icons, like the ubiquitous gear icon for settings.
Ensuring that different areas, pages, and tabs without your dashboard have consistent layouts and employ the same design patterns to provide a cohesive experience.
Customization
No matter how diligent you are in researching which features and visualizations diverse user groups will want, there will come times when individuals need to customize or personalize their content. Providing ample options for users to customize their dashboards gives you wiggle room to help accommodate a wider range of preferences and needs.
For example, you may consider allowing users to change time periods or comparison groups when displaying data. You could also allow users to toggle between different formats when exporting data out of a view. When in doubt, it's great to provide users with additional options as long as you avoid clutter and embrace progressive disclosure.
Responsiveness
We often think that brand perception and big-picture factors drive app usage and loyalty. But it’s also true that aspects we sometimes think about as table stakes—performance and reliability—can have huge impacts on app perception. In fact, a Google poll in which over 50% of mobile visitors abandoned sites that take longer than 3 seconds to load indicates that responsiveness contributes significantly to abandonment.
Responsiveness extends beyond just raw speed; it’s also about ensuring that dashboards perform similarly well across desktops, tablets, and mobile devices. With data increasingly showing that users are spending more time on mobile and less on desktop, it’s more important than ever to adopt a mobile-first mindset. Every access point matters, so make sure your app looks and functions perfectly on smaller screens before moving on to others.
Dashboard design best practices
Analyzing successful dashboards for SaaS tools
If you look closely at examples of successful SaaS dashboards, you’ll often find that they hew closely to a few critical best practices.
They deliver value. Great dashboards are intentionally designed to be valuable to users, starting with careful attention to user motivations and needs. Providing appropriate KPIs and key metrics will go a long way toward delivering value and keep users coming back for more.
They empower users. Dashboards help democratize access to data within organizations and empower users to evaluate progress toward goals without complex requests or data pulls. Make sure that your dashboards actually help users glean insights, and consider adding functionality or tooltips to help people interpret data further.
They adhere to certain common design patterns. Effective dashboards follow established design patterns, such as logical grouping of related information, consistent use of colors, and a hierarchical data structure.
Real-world examples
We could continue talking about what great dashboards look and function like, but for such a visual product, it’s often better to show rather than tell. Below, let’s examine some successful SaaS dashboards and what makes them great.
HR and recruitment dashboard
When Jobble came to us for help with their on-demand staffing platform, they were focused on expanding their job promotion services to allow in-house recruiters to manage and customize ads for job openings themselves. To keep it competitive and appealing to those looking to cut out the middleman (agencies), we partnered with them to create a solution as powerful as it is intuitive.
For example, by including longitudinal applicant tracking and tooltips to show time-based comparisons, we gave recruiters access to granular and high-level KPI data simultaneously. Including real-time notifications with intuitive graphics allowed users to rate prospective applicants quickly and access resumes without toggling away from the dashboard.
Healthcare dashboard
We worked with iQuartic, a health software company, to modernize its internal workflow management and review tools. Starting with no more than a patient chart PDF, iQuartic’s tools help risk-adjustment experts price insurance policies based on real patient data.
When creating their dashboards, we strove to provide health plan administrators with the most important KPIs they need to make decisions daily, monthly, quarterly, and annually. By plotting metrics with clear color coding to indicate performance, we were able to help stakeholders make confident decisions quickly.
Why an improved dashboard user experience matters
Like so many elements of UX, creating great dashboards straddles the line between art and science. To hit the mark, you’ll need to delve into rigorous research, meticulously observe design principles, and be strongly committed to delivering value for end users. In general, keeping things simple and clean—while still allowing room for individual customizations—goes a long way.
In the end, these principles matter because they demonstrably improve user experience enough to keep users coming back, and they often have a synergistic effect when paired together. The next step for anyone looking to make a next-level dashboard is to assimilate these principles and suggestions into their existing workflow(s).
At Neuron, we pride ourselves on our commitment to helping clients fully realize their ideas—no matter what stage they’re currently at. If you’re ready to create the dashboard of your dreams, our team is standing by to help today.
About us
Neuron is a San Francisco-based UX/UI design agency that creates the best-in-class digital experiences to help your business succeed. Whether you want to create. anew dashboard or refine an existing one, we strive to create collaborative client partnerships that bring your vision to life.
Want to learn more about what we do or how we approach optimizing sales applications? Get in touch with our team today, or browse our knowledge base of UX/UI tips.
Comments