What's Covered
In recent weeks, we’ve been working with our Lighthouse partners to build their dream customer analytics experience with Embeddable. As we’ve embarked on these projects, we’ve learned a thing or two about how best to approach it (and how not to!)
Here’s our guide on some of steps that you might want to consider in the building of your Embeddable analytics experience. You’ll likely have your own existing process, but we hope this guide will present some ideas for you to consider, and serve to provide a framework for you if you don’t already have one.
1. Define audience & purpose
The aim: To have a clear vision of the data that would be valuable to your end users and who those users are.
A strong definition of the value you want to create, and the audience you want to create it for will be key in developing strong, impactful analytics experiences that deliver value to your customers.
Our approach:
- Reach out to your top customers and ask them what insights they would find valuable.
- Ask your sales team what data / insights are requested by prospects.
- Speak with your customer success team to find out:
- whether customers are aware of the value your platform provides (and could this be better highlighted using an analytics experience)
- what data they would like to see
- what data they regularly get requests for
2. Host brainstorming session
The aim: To get creative & agree on a minimum valuable experience for your customers.
Once you’ve established the end user and the insights you want to deliver, it’s useful to gather ideas on how best to deliver the desired outcome - we’ve found that some brilliant ideas have come from open discussions with a broader range of team members who can give their own spin, applying their unique experiences as consumers of data themselves.
Our approach:
- Set up a session with all your stakeholders - this may be members of your design, product, engineering, sales and customer success teams depending on your organisation.
- Host an open and creative forum about the kinds of dashboarding experiences that would inspire your customers. Some prompts you can use:
- What types of graphs / charts inspire you?
- If you could build anything, what would you build?
- What dashboard experiences have you loved within other tools (e.g. Stripe)?
- How can we get our customers to pay attention to these insights?
- What can we do to make this an enjoyable and interesting experience for our customers
- What core elements of our existing platform (ease of use, fun UI, graphics) can we bring into this experience?
- It’s very easy to quickly have 15 charts that you want to show your customers - but less is more! Start with 3-4 charting experiences that you’re confident will add value to your customers that you can build on.
Ideally, from this session you’ll have some wireframes/sketches for the types of analytics components you want to deliver for your customers, and be able to confidently explain them to the engineers.
3. Technical sign off
The aim: To confirm the required data is available.
Before embarking on the build, it’s important to ensure that the tech stack and the implementation are well-understood by the team who are going to implement it. This will enable you to discover opportunities and identify issues as early as possible before you jump into the build phase.
Our approach:
- You’ve come up with some dream charts with data that you know your customers will love, but you now need to actually get that data.
- Discuss with your engineering or data team the data that you ideally want to show in your analytics experience, and they can advise you on whether it is available from your database.
- This will also allow the engineering / data team to understand the dream solution that you are building towards.
4. Perfect your designs
The aim: To complete draft designs for your analytics experience.
After receiving input from the wider team and a technical sign-off from engineering team, you should have a really solid picture of what you want to build and what will be involved in achieving your dream customer experience. You’re now ready to perfect the designs!
Our approach:
- When planning your designs, it’s important to consider the limitations of the platforms you will be using to implement the analytics experience. Is there a limited charting library you can choose from? This limitation is one of the reasons we have an open-source library for Embeddable - the sky is the limit and you can implement any charting experience you can imagine!
- Interactivity is crucial for designs - it’s important for your engineering team to know what happens when a user clicks or hovers on a chart.
- Is there any behaviour that’s crucial to your UI / UX that is reflected elsewhere in your platform?
- Once designs are complete, have a check-in with your engineering team & your chosen platform to confirm you can move ahead.
5. Agree on a launch plan
The aim: To ensure your new customer-facing analytics experience launch is on time, and is a success with our customers
Whether you’re using scrum/agile or waterfall, planning and prioritising your timelines and launch plan will help you to align development resources and design support to ensure efficient and effective delivery of your new Embeddable analytics experience.
Our approach:
Whether your test users are internal, or a group of customers who you have a good relationship with and expect to get feedback from, it’s often a sensible idea to conduct a staged launch before rolling out to your full user base.
- Choose some ideal customers who will be the first recipients of your new customer analytics experience. These should be customers who:
- will give open and honest feedback
- fit your ideal customer profile
- should get value from your new analytics experience
- Let the customers know that they will be first testers of the new feature, and book in feedback calls with them.
- Launch to these customers and monitor the response before rolling out to your full user base.
Summary
Following this process should ensure you’ve got a robust plan, delight your customers and are ultimately able to move the dial on the KPI’s you’re trying to improve.
Of course, these are just our suggestions on how to get the best out of your launch. If you have existing well-established processes internally then you’ll likely want to stick with them - but we hope this guide helps to give you an idea of some things you might want to consider.
If you have any suggestions on how to improve this process, or want to speak to a member of the team to find out more about how to ensure successful deliver, feel free to reach out to the team.