As a payments API company, the Balanced dashboard is a vital part of the product, providing essential payments data to help marketplaces manage their transactions, customers, disputes, and balances. Over time, the evolution of the product required adding more and more features to the dashboard that impacted the way information was displayed. We were stuck in a pattern of amending the design to accommodate something new, creating an incongruent UI that mixed legacy design with new improvements. The goal of the redesign was to find ways to improve the overall usability of the dashboard and create a cohesive design language that differentiated Balanced.
The redesign effort provided an opportunity to take an indepth look at the core users and their needs as well as the tools most relevant to their day-to-day operations. User profiles were created to outline the four main use cases of the dashboard. I used Google Analytics and Mixpanel to track user behavior and understand which actions and tasks were most common.
All the actions and pages were categorized to develop a hierarchical structure. I identified the content and information-type common across different pages to develop a flexible layout. The vision from the start was to remove as much clutter as possible. Color was strategically used to highlight payment issues requiring attention.
The new dashboard made better use of the browser window by using a fluid layout to maximize table space. The location of the payment buttons were rearranged as global or local actions depending on their frequency of use. To maintain consistency moving forward, a visual style guide was created to standardize fonts, colors, button styles, page templates, and modal templates.
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