Before starting research and design, I collaborated with key stakeholders to define the project scope and success criteria, ensuring alignment on goals and establishing clear metrics to measure success post-launch. This foundation provided a shared vision and informed key decisions throughout the design process. These core drivers shaped my design approach.

The user journey revealed that data analysts spend countless hours testing and refining new ideas to improve their analysis. However, the lack of proper support for testing, refining, and iterating on ideas; makes their process of generating impactful reports more complex. Analysts also encounter other obstacles throughout their analysis journey, adding to the challenges they face. Here are the pain points identified throughout the analysis process:

Through user observation and research synthesis, I identified key opportunities to improve the analysis process. These insights, not explicitly mentioned by users, came from understanding their behaviors and pain points. In addition to challenges with analysis, analysts often struggle with presenting data as a compelling narrative, structuring insights effectively, and breaking down complex analyses into smaller, digestible pieces for specific requests. The goal of these opportunities is to enhance and empower analysts’ ability to produce more meaningful and insightful analysis, both for themselves and their stakeholders. Below are a few key opportunities essential for shaping this new user experience:

The old Periscope Data platform faced several challenges, making it crucial to prioritize the right problems. The primary focus is enabling in-product testing through continuous iteration. To ensure clarity and alignment, I defined a Problem Statement that articulates our core challenge. Additionally, I crafted a How Might We Statement to reframe the problem as an opportunity, guiding my design decisions and helping my product team stay focused on a clear path forward.

The design phase was driven by the users’ difficulty in testing and refining their analysis directly within the product. With this in mind, my solutions were centered on creating an environment that enables analysts to explore different ideas, test them, and refine their findings. In addition to tackling the primary challenge, the goal was to improve the overall workflow by introducing features that support the creation of micro-analyses and assist analysts in crafting clearer, more engaging narratives around the data in reports. My design process began with developing low-fidelity wireframes to test and refine the overall design direction with users, before progressing to high-fidelity designs using Sisense’s design system. Once a direction was validated through user feedback, I applied the design system, utilizing UI components, colors, and elements to create a more polished, realistic version of the design. All designs were tested through interactive prototypes, allowing users to experience vital interactions, and providing a more immersive feel. This approach enabled testing of both primary and micro-interactions, essential for fine-tuning the user experience. It also provided critical feedback to ensure the design remained focused on user needs and objectives.

After launching this new experience and evaluating usage data over multiple quarters, the redesigned experience outperformed the previous Periscope Data platform. By framing analysis as an iterative process—testing ideas to uncover insights—while enabling analysts to create compelling data narratives with images, text, and video, the new design fostered more impactful analysis for analysts, improved understanding of reports for stakeholders, and increased collaboration across data teams. Ultimately, this led to higher user satisfaction, more effective data-driven decision-making, and the successful replacement of Periscope Data.