Prosper
Company Type
Nonprofit
Industry
Economic Development
Product Type
Website
Services
UX Design, UI Design, Product Strategy Workshop
Deliverables
Wireframes, High Fidelity Designs, Design System
Prosper is a nonprofit in Birmingham, AL, founded in 2021 with a vision to build the most inclusive and thriving economy in the Southeast by aligning Birmingham and Jefferson County around inclusive Job Creation, Job Preparation, and Job Access goals and strategies. To track these initiatives and their progress, they created the Birmingham Economic Dashboard alongside others in the Birmingham community. The first version of the dashboard was recently completed, and Prosper engaged LunarLab to give the dashboard a fresh UI design before release to the public.
Original Designs (Before)
Discovery
Prosper & their economic partners created the following mission statement for the dashboard: “The Birmingham Economic Dashboard represents a collective led by our economic development and business community to set a clear north star for our community on how we are progressing and how we compare to cities all over the country. As we work toward our collective vision to be the most inclusive and thriving economy in the Southeast, the Birmingham Economic Dashboard will monitor our progress, provide transparency, and hopefully inspire the collaboration necessary to ensure these numbers continue to move in the right direction.”
After reviewing the first version of dashboard, we came up with a list of our biggest concerns:
- Too many clicks to get to the dashboard itself.
- The goals for why the dashboard was created in the first place weren’t clear.
- There was no way to tell how Birmingham was doing in comparison to the stated 20% growth goals.
- The data was difficult to interpret.
Design
We proposed combining the Landing page and the Goals page into a single page that described what the Birmingham Economic Dashboard was for, what all categories are being measured, and why it mattered. Since the original page was built in Tableau, it also lacked SEO (Search Engine Optimization) capabilities. We recommended rebuilding this page in WordPress so that Prosper could leverage better visibility within search results.
As for the data dashboard, we made a number of changes:
- The 4 main areas that Prosper is measuring was previously in a dropdown. The dropdown isn’t super noticeable, so we moved them into tabs across the top of the page, which increases visibility and makes them easier to find.
- The vertical bar charts were hard to read, so we flipped them to be horizontal instead.
- The various measures of data were originally in a dropdown control, allowing a person to only view one measure at a time. For example: you could only see Median Hourly Wage for Tech Jobs, but not how it compared to Median Hourly Wage for Production Jobs. So we created a stacked bar graph to view all wages in a single view.
