self-service and modern data user experience

problem

CU Boulder announced a goal of become more data-informed; however accessing data was challenging. University data was scattered across systems, databases, reporting tools, and Excel spreadsheets. Users had to go to multiple places to get the data they need and wrangle a bunch of spreadsheets together. This resulted in a tedious and painful data user experience and posed a barrier to enabling a data-informed culture. Users complained of the process taking too long, datasets being incomplete, difficulty in merging data across multiple spreadsheets, and more.

In 2018, I joined the Office of Data Analytics (ODA) as their experience success manager and I took the lead on designing a data self-service offering.

opportunity

How might we make it easier for regular users to access and use university data?

goals & design process

Make data easier to access.

ODA had already developed a one-stop data hub (A360) that brings together dashboards and reports from across university reporting systems. My team and I decided to build out a data self-service capability from within A360 allowing users to easily create, save, and share a report without ever having to leave this tool.

Make data easier to use.

Clicking on “creating a report” launched a custom Tableau report creation experience within the A360. Users can select a Tableau data source they already had permission to access; and this launched a Tableau web experience within A360. In addition to creating a report from A360, users can share a report, and select an existing report to edit and save as their own.

Make it fun!

While Tableau had somewhat of a learning curve, it was intuitive enough for regular data users to quickly learn. In addition, Tableau has plenty of online resources, videos, and user groups to learn from. Leveraging Tableau and edit access to already built dashboards enabled us to create a fun user experience: users would have the opportunity to “play” with existing visualizations, explore the underlying data, and find their own data insights.

results

  • Created a better data user experience that made data easier to access, use, and fun!
  • Designed an innovative and sustainable solution by leveraging Tableau web experience and already built data sources, dashboards, and visualizations.

credits

Designing a modern data self-service experience at CU Boulder is the result of the hard work of many people and teams in the Office of Data Analytics.