How can we empower advisors with insights they need to optimize their business operations?
PRODUCT DESIGN • Responsive webEnhancing the advisor dashboard experience with information hierarchy and business metrics resulted in a 21% higher NPS score.
My Role: Senior Product Designer
Team: 1 Designer, 1 Product Manager, Data Analyst, Advisor Community Manager, Customer Service Reps, Developers
Duration: 3 months
Tools: Figma, FigJam, SurveyMonkey, Dovetail
Platform: Responsive web
Overview
I conducted user research to understand the advisor experience and their sentiments on the current dashboard.
I gathered and analyzed insights on advisor pain points and key metrics needed to influence and increase engagement.
I designed and delivered the optimized dashboard experience, including new performance metrics pages.
My Role and Contributions
The Problem
The advisor dashboard was outdated and not optimized for current Advisor needs, leading to a poor user experience. Advisors struggled with a cluttered interface, limited visibility and understanding of their key performance metrics, resulting in missed opportunities to engage with customers effectively.
Challenges
The current dashboard lacked hierarchy and had too many sections that lead to cognitive overload.
Due to tight timeline, limited engineering resources and the least disruptive experience for advisors, business stakeholders aligned on a phased approach.
The first phase was to optimize the current dashboard layout with minimal UI changes.
Goals
UX Goals
Empower advisors with an intuitive dashboard, featuring a better organization of information and clear metrics to help guide their customer interactions.
Business Goals
Increase advisor satisfaction and desktop platform engagement. Provide advisors with a trend analysis of their revenue to help them understand their growth patterns.
Results: Before & After
Before
After
After a few iterations guided by user research, design critiques and dev handoff meetings, the final designs resulted in a 21% increase in the advisor NPS score (29 from the previous quarter to 35).
The most impactful changes were:
Layout optimization: Guided by insights from advisor interviews and surveys, sections of the dashboard were organized according to what was most valuable and useful.
Business metrics: With the addition of performance data, advisors were shown a real-time snapshot of their business, helping them make more informed decisions.
Part 1: Optimizations
The dashboard is the advisor’s first touchpoint on the platform and is the main hub of their business activities (most used on desktop). Given the requirement of minimal UI changes, I focused on a few key principles for optimizing the dashboard:
Hierarchy: Update typography hierarchy using our current design system components.
Balance: Design a balanced layout with clearly defined sections and simplify call-to-actions.
Reduce cognitive load: Visual clutter was decreased by removing redundant content.
1) Stats Overview
The top section provided a clear focus on an overview of the advisor’s most important business metrics. By clicking into each metric, an advisor could view more specific details and corresponding data visualization.
2) Arranged Conversations
The customer waitlist and appointments section were condensed to highlight the most immediate conversations to help advisors stay timely and prepared.
3) Finances
Links to manage payment information and setting a daily earnings goal were combined into one section for more visibility.
4) Marketing Center
Two sections with 22 links were reduced to one with only 7 links, creating a more focused and comprehensible section. The new customer promo was also given more prominence to attract more attention.
5) Customer Interactions
Previously two sections now combined into one, My Customers provides an overview of the advisor’s customer interactions. Shown are the advisor’s 2 most recent connections as well any unread communications.
6) Advisor Content
Addressing an advisor pain point, this section was updated for complete visibility of a table with complete information regarding the advisor’s top two featured listing bids and links to blog content.
Part 2: Business Metrics
Insights from the advisor survey revealed the following business metrics most valued by advisors:
Total earnings
New and repeat customers
Peak hours on the platform
Free minutes (use of advisor promotions given to customers)
Connection health (successful and missed calls/chats)
The first of it’s kind since the platform’s inception, this page was designed to provide advisors with transparency into their business performance. Data visualizations with filter capabilities were included to illustrate growth patterns in an easy and consumable way.
How did we get here?
Research
Competitive Analysis
I reviewed 8 marketplace dashboards:
3 in the psychic readings space: Purple Ocean app, Kasamba and Kang websites
5 in the e-commerce/seller-services space: Fiverr, Amazon, YouTube, AirBnB, Etsy
Hierarchy was vital, focus was placed on top with the most important metrics to the user.
An overview with more detailed drill down of analytics creates focus and with the appropriate data visualizations (graphs, charts, etc.) helps the user make sense of complex figures.
Displaying the date and timestamps of when the data was last refreshed created credibility and trust of dynamic data.
Educational resources were provided to help users grow their business.
Key Observations
Advisor Survey
Methodology
User survey: 108 low-med value advisors ($5,000-99,00 revenue in 2024) and 93 high value advisors ($100K+ revenue in 2024)
Duration: 7 days
Tools: SurveyMonkey, Dovetail
Objectives
Identify pain points and potential improvements for the page.
Determine the importance and value of data categories to inform prioritization in the experience.
Assess and understand key metrics needed to influence and improve Advisor business.
Gauge advisor interest and price range for potential paid/premium features.
Survey Insights
Sentiments On The Current Dashboard
Only 17% of advisors expressed general satisfaction with the current layout.
Layout feels a bit cluttered and disorganized with unnecessary links.
Readability issues with data table columns, some information is cut off or not easily visible.
Top 4 Data Categories Most Critical To Advisor Success
Earnings
Platform Peak Hours
Repeat Customer Connections
New Customer Connections
Most Valued Dashboard Attributes Ranked
Simplicity and Ease of Use: Advisors highly valued an intuitive and straightforward dashboard that facilitates easy navigation and minimizes complexity.
Detailed and Comprehensive Data: Comprehensive data offerings are crucial for advisors to make informed decisions, track performance, and analyze various metrics effectively.
Real-time Updates: Timely data updates are essential for advisors to respond promptly to changing conditions and maintain up-to-date insights.
Data Visualization: Although visual aids like charts and graphs are beneficial, they are less critical than other functionalities.
Customization Options: While some advisors desired personalization, it is not a primary concern compared to usability and data comprehensiveness.
“I think it is horrible to charge us for tools that ultimately also help to increase revenues! This feels like features that should already be covered by the high commissions already taken to use the platform.”
Strong Opposition to Paying for Data
As an opportunity for monetization, stakeholders wanted to get a sense if advisors would be interested in paying for analytics tools to manage their business data. The majority of advisors, 71% stated that they were unwilling to pay for these features. Furthermore, less than 6% of advisors were willing to pay less than $5-10/month depending on the usefulness of the tools.
Process
A few of highlights in this design process was working closely with the Advisor Community manager, Customer Service Representatives, and our Data Analyst:
I facilitated meetings with the Advisor Community manager and a couple of CS reps to gather any help desk tickets regarding advisors calling in for issues about their current dashboard. They reported that more experienced, older advisors on the platform disliked change and preferred the layout to stay the same. As mentioned earlier, minimal UI changes was a requirement but I considered it to be a fun challenge. I knew I could make significant improvements to the experience even if I couldn’t do a complete redesign in this first release.
Close collaboration with my PM and our Data Analyst was vital. We discussed the various types of data that we could obtain from our API and what analytics we could share on the dashboard.
Prototypes
Next Steps
Measure the business impact of the new features by comparing advisor earnings before and after this first release.
Potentially add more useful revenue trends like average earning per reading and conversions from promotions.
Based on advisor tenure, explore and validate the addition of dynamic actionable feedback such as customer retention tips, seasonal/popular reading topics and others. Educational support for advisors will likely increase their platform adoption and engagement.
If there are dedicated Flutter developers available, use the current design system components to duplicate the dashboard experience from responsive web to the advisor app to increase app usage.