Providing a dashboard that shows every available widget, without the ability to customize, forces users to view information that may not be important or relevant to their jobs.
How might we help users tailor their dashboard to meet their needs and priorities?
Phil is the CEO at Acme Corp. They just hired a new CFO who will be keeping track of their payments and billing, so he no longer needs to worry about that. He wants to remove the Invoice widget from his dashboard, so he can focus on more important things.
Jennifer, their SysAdmin wants to have a snapshot of their most important projects on her dashboard. To do this she wants a view of alerts that monitor CPU, RAM and Disk for their resources on her dashboard. Monitoring is much more important to her than everything except support tickets and she wants her dashboard to reflect that.
Our team has learned a lot about designing collaboratively over this past year. One method that has seemed to work really well is putting all over our designs on the table (figuratively speaking, we actually use Mural), and then commenting and voting on them. It has helped us align on the benefits and risks of each design, and makes the selection process more democratic. It also has helped to serve as a learning process for more junior designers, to help them understand why we'd want to choose one design over another.
Long story short, we quickly put together a bunch of ideas, evaluated them and picked some favorites.
While in many ways most aspects of these features are standard in the industry, we still wanted to conduct some user testing to evaluate the drawer concept and how that interacts with the page. In this case, animation and the microinteractions of the pattern were very important, so we chose to use an HTML prototype. This also had the added benefit of allowing us to try several different realistic versions of the drawer and evaluate them.
I left my position before being able to see the results of testing.