Dare

Product, branding

2022

Dare is an internal department of Mann+Hummel company focused on extracting and analyzing big data to deliver insights for business decision-making. My task as a lead designer was to guide my team to define target user groups, understand use cases and feature lists required, refresh visual identity and redesign data visualization, and build a data library internal portal.

Target Audience, Use cases, Journey Map

We started with defining user groups and analyzing their possible needs. As Dare was a data company, they were able to share pretty good insights on existing products and user behavior. Based on the information provided we were able to review as is a journey and define new usability patterns.

The general problem was that users underestimated the influence of data on decision-making, mostly because data sets were quite hard to observe and understand. Data job has been meant to be treated as the field of data analytics and data professionals.

User Personas

To solve this problem we focused on changing this perception, extracting user groups towards directors and management, and democratizing data insight usage. We focused on three user personas, with three levels of depth of engagement:

• Highlevel — top management to monitor performance, receive on-demand reports, forecast, and identify trends.
  
  
• Experienced — mid-level management to take control of data, ensure team performance and consolidate analysts' work.
  
  
• Deep pro — data analyst, or data professional who does all the hands-on jobs and needs high flexibility in extracting, comparing, and automating data sets.
  

Brand Commitment Matrix

Brand Commitment Matrix exercise helped us to define the proper tone of voice and message to deliver. Together with the client, we were able to define the mission and vision of the company to build all the visual communication, including data visualization and product design on top of it. The brand's key idea was defined as "Re-frame the day-to-day discovery".

Brainstorm and Narratives

I came up with four directions for brand narratives. Each of the narratives contained storytelling supported by mood boards and references for visual identity, data visualization, and web design. The client's decision was to go with one called 'Plato Data', reflecting the root idea of Plato Cave and enlightenment.

Sometimes people make speculation-based decisions. Dare offers the tools to make data (or say knowledge) based decisions then purely speculative-based decisions. As data illuminates, light could be a nice visual metaphor to play with for this direction.

Identity

Visual identity of the Dare department inherited the colors and typography of Mann+Hummel company. The idea of a logo also reflects the '+' symbol from the company logo. It's based on the 'D' letterform and has pieces of pie chart to convey the data focus of the department. The logo has a well-balanced appearance and a good geometrical structure.

Guidelines

Visual design principles have been combined into brand guidelines with detailed directions on identity usage, including logo options, logo proportions, typography and font styles, brand, secondary and practical (data visualization) colors, tips on dashboards, and chart design.

Dashboard

A wide range of charts and tables have been designed for Dare dashboards. We tried to create a simple solution for complex visualizations to deliver a flexible set of tools and principles for further usage. We've created dark and bright versions for sustainable web and print usage.

Wireframes to High Fidelity

We started to develop the library portal by developing wireframes to cover all the cases possible and confirm the usability hypothesis. Through a series of prototyping and validation iterations, we moved step by step to low-fidelity and high-fidelity mockups. We were able to get to the final solution by following the evolutionary path and user-centric approach.

Library

Our final solution was not just a library of ready-to-use dashboards. We created a portal that allowed a complex approach to data usage, including:

• Feed with a personal customizable dashboard, news and cases overview, and link to latest data updates;
  
• Insights — a collection of ready-to-use data charts, with comparison feature;
  
• Dashboards — a gallery of the pre-design dashboard with flexible filtration;
  
• Datasets providing access to raw data;
  
• Services that allowed to place an internal order for deep data analysis and see recent case studies of data usage
  
  

We've created dark and bright modes of the portal, along with a mobile version with limited functionality, allowing quick access to a personal dashboard to track trends and stay informed whenever.

Handover

For proper handover we've created a UI component library and interactive prototype, along with a detailed use case-based description of portal features.

Learning and Findings

The great learning from this task was how helpful might be to challenge the initial client's task and propose alternative solutions. Starting with the inquiry to redesign dashboards and create a web library for them Dare has got 360 solutions, including branding, identity, guidelines, data visualization, and the entire data portal.

Brian Boothe

I worked with Stas on a program branding project and was very impressed by his creativity and interpretation of the message we wanted to convey. His agility and flexibility to address our comments and feedback demonstrated a strong appreciation of design concepts and team collaboration. It was a pleasure working with Stas on this project and I would recommend him to others.

MANN+HUMMEL
Director of Analytics / Technology