Kapost Insights is an analytics tool within the Kapost Platform Suite that helps marketing managers run reports integral to ensuring their team is producing content inline with their key themes and audiences, understanding the overall health of the system and team adoption as well as show executives the progress and value made possible through the use of Kapost.
At the time of joining the product and engineering team the Insights app provided a static dashboard for users to check in on content progress and performance. While some valuable data could be pulled from the pre-defined tabs of charts, the tool lacked the flexibility and refinement capabilities that was so desired by our users. During the year that I worked on Kapost Insights, I was able to contribute to major feature developments that ultimately repositioned the software from a nice to have to a powerful reporting system that received buy in from personas with purchasing power such as VPs and CMOs.
Picked up after concept design. Prototype, User testing, Iteration Design
Picked up after concept design. Prototype, User testing, Iteration Design
Design, Prototype, User testing
Design, Prototype, User testing
While still supporting the original tabs of static charts, we released the ability for a user to build custom dashboards of these same charts. This feature allowed our users to pick and choose which charts were relevant to them and place them within one dashboard where they could rearrange the order, change the titles, add descriptions and filter on basic information. After creating this dashboard they could easily manage org access by individual users, roles or teams and share the dashboard externally with people without Kapost accounts—such as their CMO.
Up until this point, the only data filtering capabilities in Insights was to refine the date range and sometimes by a specific channel or content type—and this was something that the user had to set each time the page loaded. As a product team we were able to set intelligent defaults, but our users needed the ability to look at the data through a variety of different lenses—specific teams, content, initiatives, production status, date ranges and more. Not only do our users need to dig into the details of a specific chart to gain actionable insights, but they need to be able to manipulate the data in a way that they can craft a compelling story to quantify the value of their marketing efforts.
Previously, Insights only allowed users to display data based around their Content, but there was a strong desire to display charts based on Initiative (basically campaigns including multiple pieces of content) as well as the ability to understand user adoption of the platform. While the existing content charts were quickly adapted to be specific to initiatives, the adoptions charts required completely new visualizations. Based on user feedback, we created charts that allowed reporting on active users, actions taken by users and comparing volume of actions over time.
This charts allows a Kapost admin to see which of their members are active (or not) based on one or more system actions they consider “active”. After designing the chart itself, I conducted extensive user testing with customers to uncover which system actions are most valuable to them when looking to find active team members.
This chart allows users to select a handful of groups (teams or user roles), define which actions qualify as “active” and compare these groups over a specified length time range.
This modal was added to all adoption charts once it became very clear in user testing that our users needed to drill down into the data to see who was or was not taking the actions they specified. This was integral for them to identify laggards when onboarding a new team or to identify power users who could champion the use of Kapost with their team. By making small additions to this modal—action counter and latest activity date—we were able to reduce the number of adoption charts originally identified in the scope of the project.
As the types and number of charts grew, the original method of adding charts was quickly becoming a tedious and inefficient workflow, especially for users who were not quite sure which chart they wanted to add to the dashboard. We made several enhancements to the original modal to improve this experience: A screen to identify which category of chart you wanted to add (content, initiative or adoption), the ability to select multiple charts at once, and a quantity counter to add multiples of the same chart. These additions allowed our users to quickly navigate through charts and streamline the process of creating a new dashboard.
The work completed during my time on the Insights team was a huge transformation for the app, but there was still a lot of room for improvement. When considering the future of Kapost Insights, there are a few UX projects that come to mind:
Rework the Insights index page: quickly create new dashboard, display a featured dashboard, alerts on spikes in chart data...
Surface insights data in context throughout other Kapost apps
UX improvements to dashboard creation and management workflow
