What's Covered
Many companies are nailing their user-facing analytics experiences. These are the ones that offer brand consistency, load fast, allow customization and interactivity, serve a clear purpose, and are mobile responsive.
It’s almost impossible to achieve remarkable customer-facing analytics that follow all the mentioned characteristics by using a standard embedded analytics tool.
That’s why companies like Meta, Guesty, QuickBooks, Hotjar, and Lattice built fully bespoke analytics into their tools—answering their users' needs. To help you get inspired, we’ve analyzed these five examples of remarkable customer-facing analytics experiences. Plus, we’ll show you how to achieve high customization levels in a fraction of the development time.
Learn from the experience of three companies that built their own user-facing analytics. Read more.
What makes customer-facing analytics experiences remarkable?
Analytics need to be useful, above anything else. That could mean your dashboard helps the end user make important data-driven business decisions or simply be informed. Either way, a good dashboard is highly relevant to the end user.
So, before embarking on the journey of building custom analytics into your app, here are a few elements to consider when building remarkable user-facing analytics:
- Clear use case. You should know exactly how your analytics are adding value and make sure that intent is clear for the end user. For instance, if you have a delivery app, you can use analytics to show a customer how long it’ll take for them to get their food. If they’re hungry, this data adds value because it empowers them to make a decision. However, if you choose to add a map showing the number of delivery people working in the country at the time, it might look cool, but it doesn’t mean anything to the customer.
- Loading time. A clearly defined use case will also help you know how fast your data should load. In many use cases, like the delivery app example, data must load fast or in real-time to keep customers happy. In less real-time cases, like Spotify’s Yearly Wrapped feature, your data has a strict collection period. If you need immediate answers, use a database for real-time analytics for data freshness and sub-second query responses—even in multi-tenant and high concurrent applications.
- Mobile responsiveness. Your analytics experience needs to look good and be accessible on all devices, particularly mobile phones and tablets. This guarantees a good user experience and adds value to the users as they can check data on the go.
- Customization. Some analytics experiences add value to their users by letting them customize what they see. Done right this can take your app to the next level; but done wrong, it could provide an awful UX and confuse your users. For example, letting users choose which metrics they want to see first, in which measuring unit, or whether they want to see the data in a table or a graph.
- Interactivity. This is similar to customization, but more related to how users interact with the data. For instance, being able to click on the data to get more information, zoom in on graphs, or add drill-downs and drill-throughs.
- Intuitive design. When presenting data, your design is key to its usability. If users don’t understand the layout, the colors are hard to read, or you’re using weird fonts, they’ll likely abandon it. Make sure you follow design principles to build eye-catching and easy-to-use dashboards. It’s also a good idea to test your design with technical and non-technical users.
Let’s take a look at these 5 companies that have nailed their analytics and see these elements come to life.
5 examples of eye-catching bespoke user-facing analytics
Here’s a list of five companies providing remarkable analytics experiences that hit all the criteria above.
1. Meta Business Suite
Meta is the largest social media company. It owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads. This company is also a huge data aggregator. It compiles all user behavioral and content consumption information, which it uses to segment paid aids and show creators how their content is performing.
For instance, let’s say you have a pottery business with an Instagram account. You sell your pieces both through the Instagram store and Etsy (which you linked in your bio). To review your page and store analytics, you need to turn your Instagram into a business account—which gives you immediate access to Meta’s Business Suite. There, you get access to an overview of your content reach, engagement, and impressions, as well as your bio clicks, store analytics, and followers' demographics.
This tool is a great solution for brands and content creators as it gives insights into what’s working and what’s not. For example, if you see a spike in sales after you posted a particular reel or paid for a marketing campaign, you can evaluate your strategy and do it again to favor the algorithm.
What makes this a remarkable analytics experience is that users can interact with most metrics and customize how many details they want to see. They can change the period, review historical data, and benchmark against competitors. It’s highly intuitive and easy to use, plus every KPI has a “hover over” style info button to explain what you’re looking at.
Meta’s Business Suite has a very clear understanding of the user’s needs and shows only the metrics that add value to them, such as audience demographics. It also loads in real-time and is mobile-friendly (with limited KPI views). This is very impressive considering Meta hosts gigantic volumes of data from millions of users across the globe—and still manages to load very fast.
In short, Meta has managed to deliver value to its users in a very intuitive, fast-loading, and customizable way that covers the many varying needs of its gigantic user base. It might seem boring to mention Meta, but it’s an incredibly well-considered and ultimately fit-for-purpose analytics experience that we can all learn and borrow from.
2. Guesty’s multi-calendar manager
Guesty is a property management system (PMS) for short-term rental owners and property managers. Usually, property owners or managers promote their listings on sites like Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, etc., and doing that manually can be time-consuming.
A PMS integrates the different tools you use to automate processes like updating descriptions and editing availability, acting as a unique source of truth. Guesty took it one step further and built many of these tools internally. So instead of integrating with a multi-calendar manager app, you can handle your bookings directly from the PMS.
This makes it a very interesting use of user-facing data analytics.
We’re going to focus on a single chart here. What we love most about this chart is the value it delivers to users, how intuitive it feels, and the complex ways the user can interact with the chart to manage their properties
The user can open the calendar and see exactly which listing is fully booked or which needs further promotion, immediately seeing from which platform by a logo. They can see the individual nightly rate per booking and can interact with it to see who made the reservation and where it’s coming from.
The user can also make edits to the calendar and trigger actions. For instance, if the owner wants to stay at their beach house for a couple of days, they can manually book it in the calendar, immediately blocking the availability in booking engines.
Apart from being highly interactive, it’s also very customizable. Users can filter listings by city, status, or tags. Guesty also uses colors to make it very visual and easy to read—following the brand’s guidelines.
If we had to find one weakness here, the mobile version looks a bit crowded in our opinion, but it’s still very useful for gaining quick insights and doesn’t distract from all the brownie points it scored up until now.
3. QuickBooks Intuit
QuickBooks is an accounting and bookkeeping software that helps small businesses stay on top of their finances, stay compliant, and invoice and pay others accurately. QuickBooks users vary from an HR person running payroll to the business CPA, or a CFO.
What makes QuickBooks analytics experience so great is that it has a deep understanding of its end-user priorities. It also recognizes that they’re likely very busy and wearing multiple hats or managing multiple clients, so they make data available at a glance. This dashboard is also available ‘on the go’ from the mobile app, driving operational efficiency.
“What’s very interesting about this one is that it’s clear about what’s the important information for the person behind the screen, and it gives them that in a way that’s not too heavy. It’s quite easy to extract the information,” says Rogan Sage, VP of Growth at Embeddable.
The ‘Tips’ module at the bottom right tells us this analytics experience was custom-made—you can’t achieve that level of customization with an embedded analytics solution. The design follows all QuickBooks guidelines and it lets you interact with it by clicking on the data.
4. Hotjar
Hotjar is a website analytics tool that allows users to review how their visitors are interacting with their website. It lets users view heatmaps and session recordings, as well as having a platform to run surveys, share in-app feedback, and host moderated interviews.
All the data sets that Hotjar collects from customer behavior tests are available in each user’s profile under the specific test. For instance, if you run a heatmap analysis and want to see where your visitors are spending most of their time, you can review that particular information by going to the heatmap portal. However, Hotjar offers users a simpler way of viewing that customer data. It now has a dashboard feature where users can review all information coming from sessions and tests at a glance.
The dashboard compiles all relevant insights and shows them on one screen. What’s remarkable about this dashboard is that Hotjar data analytics are already complex and very complete, so this tool makes it much more digestible for busy users. It’s also quite interactive as you can hover over some of the data points and review previous sessions by clicking on the metrics.
You can tell this was custom-built because it’s customizable, letting users interact with data, watch session recordings, and choose the period and the type of data they want to view per KPI. Plus, it follows the same Hotjar look and feel across all modules.
Overall, we think Hotjar does a great job at synthesizing exactly what matters for their users on one screen and enables a practical level of interaction that doesn’t confuse or overwhelm the user. The visual hierarchy of text and elements also allows users to dip in and immediately get the insights they need without searching through any unnecessary noise.
5. Lattice
Lattice is an HR software that allows HR teams and managers to track performance, plan and reach OKRs, collect feedback, gauge employee engagement, and handle salaries. That’s all supported by a lot of data.
Lattice’s analytics module helps HR teams and business leaders make decisions about their workforce. For instance, by reviewing demographics they can quickly see if there’s a particular segment that’s more or less engaged and take action.
The dashboard follows the same design as the rest of the Lattice platform, giving a seamless brand experience. Plus, users can add filters and hover over different metrics to get more information.
The level of interactivity Lattice offers is impressive, and not something you can achieve with an embedded solution—not least because it mixes business metrics with feature adoption. That means managers can review data like their team engagement scores or summarized employee feedback, while creating 1:1 meetings right from the dashboard. These advancements allow HR teams to be on top of their initiatives, ensure people thrive at work, and become a better business.
Another big win for Lattice is the simplicity of the design. There’s a lot of data there, and a lot of things going on that you’re not burdened with at an immediate glance - the design is clean and practical. Another well-considered customer-facing analytics experience!
👉 Still need inspiration? Discover six more examples of remarkable user-facing analytics
Main takeaways
We’ve covered 5 tools that deliver bespoke analytics experiences to their customers to great effect. As you can imagine, none of these companies would have been able to display such bespoke charting elements using an out-of-the-box tool like Power BI Embedded or Looker Embedded (where you have to choose from a set of cookie-cutter chart designs). These companies decided to build what they needed for their customers in a completely custom way.
Companies like Meta and QuickBooks can afford to invest heavily—and even hire whole new teams to deliver on specific projects. Smaller companies might not have the same option, so the ones who decide to invest have a very clear idea of what they want to achieve.
Whether you’re a large or small company, you might feel forced to choose between spending all your resources on building out complex, bespoke analytics, pushing analytics to the next epic, or embedding a clunky solution. Luckily there are other options available.
Different ways to add user-facing analytics to your tool
You’ve seen five examples of pretty remarkable user-facing analytics experiences, all with unique views and features. To bring your own ideas to life, you have three ways to do it:
- Embedding a business intelligence or third-party tool. The simplest and fastest way to add analytics, but loading speeds tend to be slow, and it will never look and feel like the rest of your app.
- Build it from scratch. This will allow you to gain control over your user/customer experience, but it’s incredibly complex to build custom user-facing analytics—and as a result, becomes deceptively expensive.
- Using Embeddable. From the makers of Trevor.io, this user-facing analytics toolkit gives you the best of both worlds, allowing you to build fully-bespoke, highly-performant analytics in just 10% of the time.
“Embeddable seems to be the promise of the hyper customization of Plotly with the ease of use of something like Tableau or Explo. It may be the best of all those worlds,” Justin Hayes, CEO of a shipping analytics company.
If you’re wondering how it works, Embeddable is a software development kit (SDK) that enables you to push data models and charting components (that you define in your own code) into a no-code builder that you can embed directly into your app using a secure and performant web component. This means you gain full control over how your analytics look and behave, and you can control using the caching config how fast and how fresh you need the data to load.
On top of that, Embeddable comes with a no-code builder so anyone on your team can build interactive dashboards that are aligned with your UI/UX and iterate to improve based on feedback, leading to higher customer satisfaction without needing to rely on developers. So, if you want fully custom user-facing analytics experiences like the examples above, consider Embeddable. This SDK gives you full customization freedom without rinsing dev time.
Design and build bespoke user-facing analytics in 10% of the time. Learn More.
Frequently asked questions about examples of analytics experiences
What’s the difference between user-facing analytics and BI dashboards?
The biggest difference between user-facing analytics and BI dashboards is the end user. With user-facing analytics, the person reviewing the metrics is likely accessing the data from an external application. With BI dashboards, the user is likely a manager, analyst, or someone from the company who reviews the data internally from the BI tool’s website or embedded in an internal tool.
What makes the QuickBooks analytics experience great?
What makes QuickBooks analytics remarkable is that it’s interactive, mobile responsive, and it truly thinks of the end user. It makes all KPIs available at a glance and allows users to gain more information as they click.
How useful is the Meta Business Suite?
The Meta Business Suite is extremely useful to content creators and brands because it allows them to review all data related to their posts and marketing campaigns. It shows them how well their business is performing without having to open multiple analytics tools. The Meta Business Suite also helps them make decisions based on content strategy, copy, and ad campaigns.