Customer Success Story - Report design matters

In this blog post, I'm going to share with you a recent success story from one of my customers. For privacy reasons I can't mention the customer itself, but I will give you a little overview of the company and the kind of industry they are in.

With this success story, I hope I can inspire readers and customers to think more carefully about their design choices when building reports in Power BI.

---

COMPANY OVERVIEW

Customer: Recruiting Analytics (for privacy reasons, I can't reveal the real name of the customer so I will be using a placeholder name instead)

Industry: Recruitment

Recruiting Analytics is a software company for automated job posting and recruiting analytics.

Their mission is to help everyone who works professionally with job advertisements to work together more productively. With their tool, recruiters can manage the entire job posting process in one place – from data driven multiposting campaigns to in depth analysis along the candidate journey.

Their main product is an API that allows customers to do multiposting of job advertisements, meaning posting job ads on several job boards at the same time, including niche job boards that the recruiters usually don’t know about or wouldn’t find due to time constraints.

In addition to their main product offering, there is also an UI and Analytics component.

Recruiting Analytics also collects data in order to help recruiters understand the performance of their job ads through valuable insights such as which channels have been used, the spending for the different channels, how many times the job ads were opened on the individual channels, how many people applied to the jobs and more. This will help recruiters make better data driven decisions and analysis.

Combining the multiposting with analytics offers recruiters a powerful tool to efficiently publish their job ads on external job boards and to have the insights they need to make the right business decisions so that they can attract the right candidates at the lowest recruiting cost.

CHALLENGES AND PAIN POINTS

Recruiting Analytics customers have the challenge to attract the right talent and to find the right channels where those candidates are. The job ad multiposting through their API makes the task of publishing job ads efficient, but was not sufficient nowadays to be competitive and to stand out in the recruiting market, so adding an analytics component would become a unique selling point. Their product would be a complete package of multiposting and recruiting analytics that would help establish their competitive position in the market and also create visibility as one of the unique companies offering this kind of product.

To cement their competitiveness, they created a new data analytics product to complement their original product offering. The new solution would offer valuable insights for recruiters to make better data driven decisions. Questions such as “Which channels are the right ones?” could now be easily answered, which would put them in a unique position in the market, as their product becomes more than a multiposting tool, it becomes a data driven multiposting tool.

However, the design of the new analytics solution didn't match neither Recruiting Analytics or their customers expectations. The solution combined a lot of elements in the report, but there was not any design concept thus it was difficult to use it in marketing and sales demos. The solution had poor user experience and, for Recruiting analytics, a good UI/UX was crucial.

“It was difficult to use our previous analytics solution in marketing and sales demos because the UX/UI was not good enough.”

Recruiting Analytics was looking to build an analytics tool that looked modern, that followed their branding identity, a tool that would provide the best analytics experience to their customers.

This new analytics solution is something customers will have to pay extra for in the future so the product needs to have a design that looks professional and premium.

THE SOLUTION

To fulfill their design and UI/UX requirements, Recruiting Analytics decided to redesign their entire reporting solution.

The new design helps them having an analytics product established as a premium product. It will save time in marketing as they can now take screenshots of the final product and there is no need to create designs that they can use for marketing.

It also makes their sales team happier as they can now present and showcase the real product. With the new design, they don’t have to show a product that “doesn’t look nice” anymore.

“Before, we used to create mockups because the design of our product was not good enough. With the new Power BI analytics solution we can definitely showcase the real product to our potential customers during our sales process.”

Customer expectations are now finally met. Even though Recruiting Analytics’s product is a B2B product nowadays, everyone has the idea and expectation that the software and tools look well designed.

Recruiting Analytics has now found and established a design style for analytics. Looking into the future and further development of analytics tools, they now have a standard for the different elements like filters, line charts, bar charts, tables, so they can easily reuse the design standard framework. This solution will also allow Recruiting Analytics to do product iterations a lot quicker in the future, from concept to implementation.

---

THE INTERVIEW

19th August 2022

Helen C.

Product Manager at Recruiting Analytics

Helen is a Product Manager at Recruiting Analytics. She’s responsible for the UI of the multiposting tool and their analytics product, including their Power BI analytics solution. Her tasks include understanding the requirements from their customers, making sure that the product fullfils those requirements and also collecting feedback and evaluating any challenges so that the product can be improved accordingly. She also works closely with other teams at Recruiting Analytics, making sure that timelines are lined up with marketing and that the technical feasibility or best solution is found for the final product implementation. In a nutshell, she is the “bridge” between the customer and the business.

What do you think of the final product? Does it meet your expectations?

The final product definitely met our expectations. When we showcased the final product to our sales team they asked “Is this a real product or an image, like a design concept image?”. They were really impressed!

Something that we really liked was the level of detail you applied in the design. You really thought about the details and it looks amazing.

Before we started working with you we checked online the kind of service we wanted, we checked designs in forums, the Power BI Data Stories Gallery etc. I looked at so many designs trying to find a report that somehow met the UI and design level that we wanted to achieve, but they all looked like out of the Microsoft Box and this is not what we wanted… we thought we needed to create loads of custom visuals, which would make this project quite expensive.

"Before this project, we didn’t really believe that we could get the UI we wanted with Power BI, we thought it was not achievable. By working with you, we learned that there is a lot more to Power BI than just simple standard reports."

In the end we started working with you and it was the best decision! Before this project we didn’t really believe that we could get the UI we wanted with Power BI, we thought it was not achievable. By working with you, we learned that there is a lot more that you can do with Power BI than just the simple standard reports. This was definitely a success story for us!

What’s your favorite part in the solution?

Something that really annoyed us before is that the design didn’t match our branding identity. Now we have a design that is inline with our font styles, the colors fit to our brand, etc. It’s a framework that is harmonic. The design also fits the rest of our UI tools so now I would say that we developed something that fits perfectly with the framework of other solutions we have.

"Now we have a design that is in line with our font styles, the colors fit to our brand, etc. It’s a framework that is harmonic."

How was your overall experience working with Data Pears? Would you recommend our expert services?

Definitely yes, I would definitely recommend it. We already got more ideas for follow up projects where I would definitely say that we cannot do it with someone else, we have to do it with you.

The entire process was smooth and the outcome was great! Thank you!

What advice do you have for other companies that are struggling with the design of their Power BI data products?

I would say don’t try to find solutions internally.

Clearly define the problem and then discuss it with you because you are the expert. You have lots of experience in Power BI at different levels, on the design and UI/UX level but also on the data modelling and architecture level.

An example is when we needed a lot of filters on the same page that would take a lot of space. We discussed this with you and you promptly suggested creative solutions for this.

So define the problem and discuss it with Mara to understand the art of the possible and the complexity of what you’re trying to achieve.

I would also recommend customers to not have their design requirements locked, to be more open to explore solutions with an expert like yourself as they will most probably end up with better data products.

Interested in learning more about Power BI Report Design? Then the Power BI Report Design Bootcamp is for you!