Building The Lula Data “Insights” Product From The Ground Up

As Lula scaled and gained more Mid-market-/Enterprise-level chain customers, demand for data insights to enhance operational efficiency rose

Nov 2022

As the Data UX Researcher, I was responsible for interviewing Mid-market+ merchants, creating and facilitating usability experiments, and collaborating with the UX designer, Head of Product, Head of Account Management, and Engineering Team.

• Increase general visibility on store performance
• Report on poor performance & areas that need improvement
• Increase completion rate

1. Round 1 User Interviews

• Conducted 14 interviews to understand user need behind data, gain understanding of what data would be useful, and assessed platforms/tools they already use for non-Lula related data purposes.

• Key Finding(s): On top of general performance visibility, it’d be highly useful and efficient for users to be alerted about poor performance in real-time and on daily or weekly basis.

2. Low-fidelity data reporting prototype + Round 2 User interviews

• Crafted semi-automated email workflow through Hubspot that reported completion rates, revenue, consecutive order cancellations, and more performance tracking metrics to 5 managers & regional managers, of different chains. This project spanned a week where the 5 managers were emailed daily for 7 days. The managers were notified beforehand. After the 7 days of testing, the 5 managers were interviewed.

• Key Finding(s):
1. 1/5 managers consistently opened the reporting email whereas the rest did not most of the time. Many ignored the emails in part due to receiving too many emails from our company.

2. Though the managers felt the data was useful, they needed more data to close the loop. For example, after mentioning that “Store 1” within their chain suffered a low completion rate the previous day, 2 managers wanted to understand the times of day that high levels of cancellations occurred to identify the root cause(s).

1. Collaboration

Stakeholders: Head of Product, UX designer, Head of Account Management, Backend Eng. team

2. “Insights” dashboards - Beta

1. Exclusive launch to top 3 Enterprise customers
2. UX Designer / Head of Product created Figma UI designs based on customer feedback
3. I implemented the designs via a customer accessible BI tool using SQL code and continued to manage
4. Worked with Eng. team through meticulous steps to connect Lula tech with BI tool

3. “Insights” dashboards - v1 Implementation

• After 7 months of user feedback & usability testing
• Versatile & robust dashboards
1. KPIs, data tables, bar charts, pie charts, drilldowns
2. filtering, sorting, and downloadable file (.csv, .xlsx, .pdf) options

1. Customer accessible insights & real-time performance data

2. Actionable data at every level: executive-level management, regional management, store management

3. Little to no spontaneous data requests from customer to internal team

4. Full data manipulability put into the customer’s hands

• The preferred customer data channels are important to consider early on.

• Data dashboards require maintenance & QA testing on a regular basis. Database Engineer or related assistance is necessary.

10 months

Lula