Reporting at MobileCause

Reporting is a constant issue with our system. Our users frequently ask for a host of very specific issues to be solved, but many times these issues do not align to our larger user base.

Exploration

I began with survey to gather baseline user satisfaction with our reporting interface and learn what users do with our reports after they are exported. I contacted each respondent to schedule a 30 minute interview. The interview delved deeper into their organization, its needs, and their responses to the survey.

The interviews showed our reporting was not contextual to our navigation. Users commonly navigate from our dashboard to a campaign and expect to find the information they needed. To gather reports, users must visit our reports page. From there they enter search criteria and view the results before exporting. Each of these reports was the same, regardless of use case.

Additionally, our reports do not show any trends over time. Users would need to use a 3rd party program, typically Excel we learned, to glean actionable results. From this we developed new use cases to guide our reporting design process. Below are a few.

• I want to thank those who have donated more than X amount in the last week.
• I need to provide the finance team with a standardized report of all the donors over X period of time across all digital fundraising forms.
• I need a list of all the attendees for my event so I can send it to my volunteers at the event
• I want to see how my donations are performing month over month without exporting a report.

Initial Designs

Dashboard

Working with our customer service team, I prototyped several solutions for the main dashboard before settling on this design.

Campaign Pages

Our campaign pages would take longer to develop a solution, as we will need to rethink our existing information architecture. But in order to solve some of the short term issues, we are adding short cut links to the appropriate reports for a given form (you can mouse over the dots to view the dropdown, note they are different for different form types).

Further Work

This exercise was incredibly insightful. Not only was it the beginning of a new, more user focused design process for the company, but it gave us many actionable results (as we expected). We captured baseline metrics on user satisfaction to determine the success of our efforts in the future.

We are in the process of adding many new projects including: an overhaul or our report exports, monthly reports sent via email, saving and rerunning common reports, and much more.