Zuora

Devising design system for internal sales dashboards and reports
Timeline
Context
Project Type
Team
May ~ Sep 2023
Internship
Design System
Data Visualization
2 Sales Ops Analysts
00 Understanding the System
Background
Composed of mainly data analysts, Zuora's Sales Operations team is responsible for creating dashboards and reports that optimizes the front-line sales and marketing team to enhance efficiency, effectiveness, and overall performance as they partner internally and externally with customers, prospects, and ecosystem partners.

During my internship, my role was to enhance the usability and accessibility of the existing reports.
01 Understanding the users
The Challenge
To understand the users, I conducted interviews with sales analysts and global sales leaders to extract valuable insights and define essential objectives aimed at enhancing the user experience.
01 Navigation
Excessive number of files make it confusing to navigate
02 Onboarding
It’s hard onboarding new sales analysts and teaching them the dashboards.
03 Language
Some terms that are used in dashboards are inconsistent + unexplained.
Other important insights
02 Establishing objectives
Design Goals
With the pain points in mind, I proposed design goals to guide my process.
- Accessibility
- Professionalism
- Unified Experience
How might we create an accessible and professional experience without confusing the sales analysts who are familiar with the dashboards?
03 what causes these pain points?
It all boils down to inconsistencies.
Inconsistencies with the existing dashboards cause confusion and lack of professionalism.
55 Unique Type sizes
17 Unique Dashboard Sizes
12 Unique Table Styles
140+ Spacing Declarations
30+ Unique Tile Sizes
7 Unique fonts
04 exploring the solution space
To address the problem, we need a design system.
Utilizing existing brand guidelines
Zuora had a brand design guideline mainly for graphics and promotion materials. For a unified branding and professional experience, I studied some of the existing guideline in order to select the styles to implement
Selecting core colors based on WCAG compliance
The dashboards and reports had limited data visualizations, and the number of colors that were necessary for differentiation was around 8 ~ 10. Based on WCAG compliance, I selected 8 unique colors for data visualizations, and a color each for the background and text.
Addressing technical limitations
The dashboards were built on PowerBI, which is a data modeling software. PowerBI has limited font choices, and the fonts in the brand guidelines were not available within the app. As a result, I selected the font that was the closest to the one on the existing brand guideline.
Unified dimensions for a unified experience
The biggest cause of a choppy experience was due to the different sizes of every single dashboard. I created a guideline for the layout of the dashboards.
05 USER TESTING AND ITERATIONS
Application + Testing
The sales operations team successfully integrated my design system into their existing dashboards. I used the Power BI tool to build one of the reports using the design system.

Throughout this implementation, I was able to receive feedback from the users of the system, leading to crucial refinements. Key iterations included enhancing the grid system's flexibility and introducing additional color variations tailored to different data types.
06 measuring success
Results
In the final user test, I received various positive feedback from the users of the design system and dashboards.

‟
The design system saved me time when creating new dashboards.
- Sales Analyst
‟
Before, data locations differed across dashboards. The design system's consistency now allows me to find things where expected.
- Sales Analyst
07 Looking back...
Takeaways
The more feedback, the merrier
I discovered the importance of being proactive to seek advice and input. Every individual I engaged with offered unique insights that contributed significantly to the product's growth.
To communicate with stakeholders, learn their 'language'
Starting with limited sales background, my integration into a data analyst team presented initial challenges. Defining goals and talking to stakeholders required me to learn the terms and concepts used in the reports. This self-guided exploration enabled me to effectively identify pain points for the primary users, who were data analysts.