Brief

Engage with stakeholders across the business to understand their key data and insight questions.

Create a reporting structure that supports a ‘choose your own adventure’ style experience for users where they can navigate through an interlinked set of reports to answer their own questions on business performance.

Design a set of reports with reusable modules that provide flexible insight

Findings

Users come to data intelligence with four different missions 

1. Tell me the story of what is happening in the business/in my area, and what is driving it.

2. How is performance different between two [cohorts/time periods/attributes etc].

3. Help me find a specific fact.

4. Let me download the data tables to manipulate myself.

Distinguishing these missions clearly helped the Data Intelligence team design optimised reports and services, rather than the previous situation where reports ballooned with additional feature requests, and ad hoc investigations slid into regular production without consideration of the whole.

The Business Story - Reporting Structure

I developed a KPI tree that takes the overall measure of business success (total revenue) and breaks it down by the component measures, e.g. subscription revenue + transaction revenue + hardware revenue, and so on down the chain of measures. 

Organising metrics in this way allowed the business to really understand its drivers. It also allowed me to structure a suite of reports that group metrics together in meaningful ways. 

The Business Story - Reporting Designs

The Data Intelligence home page gives an overview of the most important KPI in each area and acts as a navigation hub for users to explore stories further. 

Each story & dashboard contains a core set of common dimension filters which allow the user to drill down to their area of interest. 

Each area contains its own story, but they all have similar structures. 

1. What is happening? 

2. Is that good or bad? 

3. Why is it happening?  

4. What contextual information do we need?