Custom reporting at a glance
By surfacing the most commonly important metrics to admins like course enrollment statuses and department progress, an admin is equipped with a high-level snapshot of training integrity.
The ability to view login trends can help understand onboarding behaviour, retention, engagement, and to identify optimal times for downtime/maintenance.
A typical online learning administrator configures many complex areas of maintaining training in their company's LMS. By providing them with priority metrics and recently updated reports, they could more easily jump straight into their necessary management tasks unobstructed, or pick up where they left off in their last session. A dashboard solution was identified as a central launch-point for admins both new and returning, anywhere between daily and annually (necessitating ease of use and immediate feedback).
Understanding Personas
A series of personas were built off of an administrator experience canvas initiative to guide the identification of key tasks/insights needed from a dashboard feature. While there were 5 sub-types made to scale with varying levels of authority/technical ability, the most common jobs-to-be-done were fit into a broader administrator role to ensure maximum impact.
Early Iterations
While dashboard setup was relatively easy to follow standardized CRUD patterns in the LMS ecosystem, the challenge was in affording management options that were simple and intuitive, while keeping a minimal footprint to give the data visualization maximum room to display. A variety of display combinations were explored for both visual and numerical summaries, but in the end the limitations of the framework determined a simpler course.
Much of the complexity came from layering different drilldown views of graphics to levels that have the right level of detail, and terminate into actionable links.
Dashboard Setup
It was determined from typical permissions patterns that a higher-order System Admin would need to own the direct management of dashboards, in order to carefully distribute the right level of visibility/access between disparate owners and departments using availability rules.
Widget Configuration
Configuration of individual widgets needed to be explanatory enough to guide a user intuitively through what they might expect to find in templated visualizations. The necessary content thus appeared higher in the workflow, with broader filtering and appearance options coming last.
Expanding the Widget Library
Rich Text
For a one-to-many admin relationship, later user canvasing revealed that a simple text-editor with rich-text options could provide immediate value for posting announcements, updates, onboarding instructions, company engagment/branding, and even custom links to essential external content.
Time Spent
A key metric in training program planning and engagement is to understand time spent taking training. To summarize a variety of parameters, a box-plot model was developed to provide a more comprehensive snapshot over time of learning content duration.
My Activity
Many requests came in for an easier method of picking up where an admin left off, so a graphical timeline was developed to be able to easily scan for typical action types in a chronological record. The ability to drill down into lists of records made this feature broadly actionable to relevant reports.