During the world cup period FIFA receives a huge amount of audience engagement through multiple social media channels including sub-channels per region as well as Web, Apps and Online Games. All of this adds up to a huge amount of distributed data that is hard to quantify and make sense of.
Create a bespoke analytics dashboard that allows for data to be combined from multiple sources in order accurately quantify key metrics of FIFA'S audience engagement.
The first priority was to get a good understanding of who would be using the dashboard and what insights they hoped to gain from it. We were briefed on the departments who would receive access to the dashboard and set up interviews with members of each department to determine their user needs and the key metrics they would like to be able to monitor.
From these discussions it became clear the best way to serve multiple departments would be to split the dashboard into department relevant views. This way we could avoid potential user frustrations by making sure the data is presented with user specific relevance and at a level of detail appropriate for their role.
Following from this we then created some goal directed statements for users from those departments to highlight their motivations for using the dashboard. This helped to clarify what aspects needed to be focussed on for department view and served as a criteria of success in the development of each view.
Based on our user interviews from members of each department we set about creating a plan for the structure of the Dashboard. After reviewing the user needs and key metrics required from each group we were able to split the dashboard into logical sections and make sure the proposed structure would meet all of the users needs. At this stage it became clear their was a lot of overlap in the needs and metrics between the Digital, Product, and Business Intelligence departments so rather than create 3 separate views it proved more effective to combine them into one "Digital" view.
A set of basic wireframes were created to show what data and metrics would be included in each section of the dashboard. These were presented to each department with the opportunity to give feedback.
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With the feedback of the wireframes incorporated the next step was to create a high fidelity prototype with a branded UI to show what the final dashboard would look like. The prototype was created using Sketch and Invision and allowed the user to click through the various views and see how the data in the final dashboard would be presented. The visual design had to follow guidelines set out in the tournament brand handbook but with many colours and assets to incorporate this wasn't a limitation and resulted in a really premium and on0brand end result.
The dashboard was developed using a number of different technologies: Various API's were used to retrieve data from different platforms this was then stored and processed in a MySQL database before being imported into the dashboard and populating the various charts and graphs. Chart.js and D3.js Javascript libraries were used to create data visualisations. I was involved in producing the CSS to style various elements and graphs in this part of the project.
Before fully deploying the dashboard we conducted some final user tests with members from each of the user groups. They were given a task based user test to complete where they had to uncover specific insights from their view of the dashboard. All of the users were successfully able to complete their tasks and on average gave an ease of use rating of 4.7/5. We also gave them the opportunity to leave any other relevant feedback and received a few requests to include extra metrics and allow for more fine tuned filtering for certain data sets.
The dashboard was received very positively by all departments with much praise for its ease of use and intuitive functionality. Working closely with the end users and getting a clear understanding of their needs with multiple opportunities for feedback was essential in achieving this.
The dashboard continues to evolve with a new version released for each of the Men's and Women's World Cup Tournaments.