Dash Hudson - Customizable Dashboards

Product Design • Web

Dash Hudson is a visual marketing software that the world’s largest brands use including Apple, Amazon, and Kylie Cosmetics. They use our software daily to create, measure, predict and publish photos and videos. As well as see trends, analyze, and enhance performance across organic, paid, and e-commerce marketing channels.

In 2020, we took on the challenge of building Dash Hudson’s first-ever fully customizable dashboards & reporting product.

The Problem

Corporate companies and their portfolio brands don’t have a single source of truth for gathering visual marketing data that powers their reports within Dash Hudson.

Social Media Managers, Directors and strategy owners at the highest levels of brands & their parent corporates have to:

- Navigate to many different data sources
- Export data (oftentimes in different formats)
- Copy into spreadsheets to make manual calculations
- Translate raw data into slide decks & PDFs

TL;DR:
It’s a painstaking process to get the right people, access to the right information, at the right time.

Research

Working with the Product Manager, we had discovery calls with 11 customers. We wanted to get a well rounded understanding of how our customers were currently reporting on their social media performance so we talked to a range of people from Social Media Coordinators of smaller brands to Strategy Directors at major corporations.

We learned that everyone had very similar processes. They cared about the same social channels and similar KPIs. They were all manually grabbing the data from numerous sources and the process was very time-consuming. They all entered the data into spreadsheets and every week and/or month created slide decks outlining their performance.

Brainstorming & Wireframing

Using InVision Freehand, the Product Manager and I worked together to brainstorm different solution ideas through wireframing. We worked through user flows, created dashboards for each persona type, and focused on a solution that could scale.

Designs & Prototyping

After brainstorming and wireframing, we received buy-in from leadership to move forward with our proposed plan. I started working on how dashboards might look with high-fidelity designs and prototypes. We went through many iterations of the designs focusing on three different report types and the flexibility of creating custom dashboards. We tested our designs with 5 corporate brands and iterated again based on customer’s feedback.

Building Dashboards

Once we were confident with our plan, we started building the first iteration of dashboards. We focused on Instagram to start and after we had the core functionality built we reached out to 20 brands and invited them to participate in a beta. The beta allowed us to gain early feedback and discover any potential bugs before releasing the product to all of our customers. When we were confident we had Instagram just right, we moved on to supporting Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.

Launch 🚀

We launched dashboards to all customers in June 2021. Within three weeks we had 586 dashboards created with 4,697 reports. Within 3 months, dashboards have contributed to a large amount of ARR in expanded contracts and have saved an even larger amount of at-risk contracts from churn. We continue to iterate on dashboards making the product even more powerful for our customers. 💪