Business Need:

Syndera Self-service Dashboard

Syndera's software suite provides real-time visibility and control of mission critical business processes by enabling users to monitor, analyze and act on business process operational events.

The Suite had extensive functionality for extracting business system data and presenting it in various ways. Mental Models was brought in to help Syndera in two key areas: revamp the application to better suit business users, and simplify and expose more functionality within the self-service dashboard.

Key Contributions:

One part of the application addressed defining what data to present and how to capture it from various business systems. The system was originally designed to be used by an IT professional. The Mental Model of the application needed to be reset to how a business user thinks. One key modification was to more clearly separate the Chart Options vs. the Data Options within the Information Architecture. As shown below, the Chart Options were modified to use terms familiar to the business user.

Syndera Architect with Chart Component
 

Syndera Dashboard Trend Window

The application also included a self-service dashboard through which end-users could view various KPIs, graphs, tables, etc. The objective here was to add additional functionality as well as simplify the presentation of reports and data. Several modifications were made in this system. The Data Options were made more consistent across the system, so that it would be easier to switch between presentation types. Here as well, Chart Options familiar to the business user were utilized. In addition, new presentation styles were provided, along with more powerful capabilities, such as real-time series/trending.

Another interesting challenge of the project was that the designing functions of the application were implemented as an Eclipse plug-in and the dashboard was a browser-based application implemented in Flash. Where the functionality overlapped, it was necessary to make the process similar while honoring the conventions of the implementation.

Syndera Architect was Implemented as an Eclipse Plug-in
 

Design Highlight: Align Functionality Design with Target User

Syndera Wizard Conformed to the User's Mental Model

The Syndera system dealt with real-time data. In order to create a presentation, a user would first have to identify the data extractions he planned to use, determine how to combine the data to get the desired metrics, and continue working forward towards the charts. This "forward-facing" process was not intuitive to business users; they didn't first think about raw data. Instead, their thought process was to initially think about what they wanted the charts to include.

With this in mind, Mental Models created a process that corresponded with the business users' thought process. The system was modified to allow use of simulated data and previewing of the charts so that a business user could first think about how they wanted the data presented, and then work backwards to determine raw data that would need to be extracted, how to combine data to get metrics, etc.