Pivotal Labs Benchmark Index
Client: Pivotal Software (VMware), Agency: Type/Code
Role: UX/UI Design, Design Lead, Oversaw Product Development
Background & Task
Pivotal’s mission is to transform the way the world builds software, with a huge part being educating industry leaders (C suite level) on the necessary steps to become a leading tech company. Pivotal came to us with data from over 1,600 tech leaders across five countries and multiple industries on their client list, but raw data was difficult and inaccessible at its current design. After a deep dive into the problem, we concluded that the most effective solution was to design a friendly user-facing evaluation tool to compare one team’s technological approach in relation to that of their industry’s norms.
Problem & Goal
How to translate an immense amount of raw data into delicious bites so Pivotal’s sales team can leverage the tool we build as a sale’s tool to start a conversation with executive leadership for a potential business engagement.
In the US, Pivotal’s a mostly established brand within executive leadership but not in Europe in terms of brand awareness.
Our goal was to increase the sales team’s value to customers whilst raising Pivotal overall brand awareness.
Research & Insights
There are CEOs/industry leaders that have no idea that they need to improve software. They’re conscious of being disruptive and know the answer to that is related to digital but there is no clear actionable insights. ex: why is Netflix performing so much better than a competitor?
For C suite executives who were interested in comparing their own organization to other big players in a similar landscape but they had to be shown that the path ahead was painless.
Pivotal has a strong arsenal of partners in Europe, we should utilize those references to rise brand awareness in Europe marketing.
Information Architecture
Parsing spreadsheets with a set of scripts and backend settings to support the custom CMS solution
Solution: Revealing Key Insights through Data
We designed a web-based platform to accommodate the largest possible set of data points (foreseeing Pivotal will soon expand its data to more countries and sectors ), and also effectively communicate key insights at a glance.
The platform filtered content by industry and arranged it into 4 sections: Key Findings, Rankings, Explore the Data and Methodology. To help users quickly dive into each sector’s data stories, I designed the sticky fixed filter bar on scroll so users can easily filtered content within each sector.
The biggest challenge was to define a set of charts that best represented the raw data, while anticipating any foreseen future data growth. One of the examples is the usage of the bubble chart - by anticipating that the number of sectors and countries could easily increase, I used bubble charts to quickly show the volume of each countries in a given topic. And when any complexities are added in the future, we can then combine different-sized bubbles with the x and y axis plotting on a standard scatter plot. This provides a third dimension of data that can be incredibly valuable.
The original raw data set design from Pivotal
Bubble charts to efficiently show quantitative information amount of six countries within the same category.
Stack or single bar chart to compare the totals or one part of the totals at the glance while each accent color guide a user’s eye through each related data.
Editorialized visual summaries of critical takeaways
Iterations: Creating a Participatory Experience into a Business Inquiry
During the process of building and testing with Pivotal leaderships through an interview, we learned that in order to have a better sales conversion, each potential client had to be given what they came for - data. By comparing how their organization performs against others will enable Pivotal to have a deeper conversation about the improvement.
So we tailored a questionnaire — a tool that assessed an organization’s software development practices relative to other industries and countries. Upon completion, participants were rewarded with a data-driven results page, comparing their performance against industry standards, and further breaking down areas of improvement into 3 actionable categories.
The UI of the entire experience was designed to generate dynamically, resulting in an output summary and analysis that is completely responsive.
Personalized result page
Providing actionable insights to participants based on Pivotal's analysis of industry best-practices
A customized report base on the participant's questionnaire responses and compare the answers to both industry-specific and global standards
404 page
Development
Tools used were Jira System (internal), Google Spreadsheet (client side) to create Q&A process and Zeplin to communicate design specification and prioritizing tasks to meet the launch deadline.
By working closely with our development team–a custom CMS solution was built out to manage all current and anticipated content created by Pivotal each year. By parsing spreadsheets with a set of scripts and backend settings, we were able to transform the typically long and dull process of data entry into an easy and effortless experience.
Q&A process
Style Guide & UX Power Tool Set
Outcome: Finishing touches
As a Pivotal’s internal web traffic data can’t be shared, we will take client praise as a successful metric. Also see Pivotal’s blog post about key findings from the Benchmark.