Stewardship Reporting

AT&T

AT&T has hundreds of reports they provide their enterprise customers. However, those customers weren't able to view these reports online, they took 24-48 hours to generate and the output was a compilation of spreadsheets, provided by an account manager. During part of my time working for AT&T, I was the sole designer supporting a project to reimagine their enterprise reports, called Stewardship Reporting.

Stewardship Reporting lets AT&T's largest customers (ex. Gulfstream and Bank of America) access enterprise-level trends for equipment status, billing, data usage, and network performance online with data visualization and intelligent summaries.

Skills

Graphic Design & Illustration

Information Architecture

Information Design

UI / UX Design

Usability Testing & Prototyping

Software

Start with the constraints.

Like an architect begins by understanding the constraints of the building project, I started by understanding the constraints of the platform I was working in.
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It was a given that the reporting widget on the dashboard would be the main entry point for a customer's reports. Accordions provide clear categorization and shallow navigation, while remaining within the strict size constraints. Once on a report page, tabs let users switch between report categories, without the need to go back to the dashboard. I also kept in mind future reports that would be added, and designed for scale.

How many reports need to be accommodated?

What space and pattern constraints are inherent in the platform?

How should the reports be grouped?

What's the most intuitive way to navigate through each report?

Build the prototype.

After extensive sketching, researching, and benchmarking, I created a full prototype to represent how the reports could be experienced online.

Each report had a unique data-set and scale that required unique visualizations and analysis. I had the challenge of pulling the most important information out of this data, visualizing it correctly and providing tools, like filters, that would help customers make decisions quickly.

This prototype was used for research, and also a future vision of reporting in AT&T executive presentations. Because of those executive presentations, where the prototype served a large role, this project became one of the highest priorities within its company domain.

Try out the prototype

(Desktop-friendly)

Animated gif showing clips of the prototype being used

Browse, Buy & Delivery

Usage

Billing

Network Performance

Then let the experts use it.

I conducted a study, along with a recruiter and moderator, to understand how participants would navigate through the different reports and categories, as well as the effectiveness of our shallow navigation approach.

Research Goals

Participants used the axure prototype which included the Reporting widget on the dashboard and 6 interactive reports.

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Understand if the architecture makes sense to users when browsing around different reports, unprompted

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Understand if this structure enables specific reports to be found quickly

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Understand if some reports are used more, or are more important than others, in order to inform hierarchy

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Define how intuitive the content is (report names )

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Find if users use the accordions or search for a specific report naturally

Research Info

Method

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Research was conducted with GoToMeeting online over one week in one hour sessions

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Participants were asked to think allowed while clicking through the prototype

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Participants explored the prototype until they had reviewed at least four of the six available reports

Participant Info

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6 Enterprise and 6 Small Business Participants

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Ages ranged from 25 - 65 years old

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Responsible for telecommunications at their company

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From Network Services, Pharmaceuticals, Manufacturing, Real Estate, Law and Biotech Companies

Major Findings

What Worked

✓

Participants mentioned having the full data-set below the table made the reports more actionable

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Participants favored concepts with color that drew their attention to the most important information

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The Monthly Spending and Top Spending Users reports were consistently reported to be the most impactful

✓

Most participants browsed for reports (vs. searching) and were able to easily navigate between reports

"Exactly the information we have trouble finding."

- Test Participant

"This is actually perfect."

- Test Participant

What Needed Work

❌

The widget name, "Reporting" didn't resonate with participants. One said they would prefer "Reports" instead

❌

Some report names weren't intuitive, including "Trending Relationship to Contract" and "Zero Usage"

❌

Participants sometimes didn't realize tables could scroll horizontally, when available

❌

Some wanted to click individual data points in the graph to get more details, in addition to the hover state

"It wasn't obvious that I could scroll over to the right in the table"

- Test Participant

Now implement.

After feedback from users, teammates, leadership, tech and others, designs were ready to be finalized. These were the most important reports to build first.