Why dashboard design matters in embedded analytics

It's no secret that customer-facing analytics (or embedded analytics), undergoes a more rigorous assessment when it comes to adopting such services. By definition, this type of analytics is designed to face the customers, not for internal use. As a result, the expectations for seamless integration with the rest of the application are set high, and rightfully so.

Building a customer-facing dashboard differs significantly from building an internal tool. It entails the involvement of multiple stakeholders, including product, engineering, and design teams. Each entity must be satisfied in order for the project to progress smoothly, necessitating a common "contract" agreed upon by all stakeholders to ensure maximum alignment and quality of output.

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Table of contents‍

• Key stakeholders when building a dashboard
• Why design is super important
• Intro to Mokkup
• Why Vizzly and Mokkup make sense

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What stakeholders are involved?

Naturally, engineering and product drive the development process. However, the forgotten stakeholder is design. Just as there is a ‘contract’ between backend and frontend engineering, there needs to be one between design and frontend.

Typically companies will build a high fidelity wireframe of their dashboard in Figma before moving forward with the build. Of course, this is time consuming in itself unless you have access to data visualisation-specific templates. Even then, there’s no saying if the dashboard and associated visualisations can be translated into reality. Although Vizzly is hyper flexible, this communication still needs to be accurate. It keeps the group aligned, on track and increases the likelihood of a successful product outcome.

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Why design matters?

B2B products are increasingly adopting B2C design standards, with consumer-focused design principles at the forefront of their mind. Why? Because software is highly competitive, and it's important that we prioritize the end-user experience by optimizing for usability, simplicity and trust.

Of course, the design process precedes the build process, and while tools like Figma exist, we have discovered a tool specifically tailored for designers to create dashboards even before engineering begins their work.

This tool is called Mokkup…

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What is Mokkup?

Mokkup is a platform that empowers designers to effortlessly create interactive prototypes for analytics dashboards. It provides an array of features that assist designers in visualizing their designs, collaborating with team members, and generating realistic interactive prototypes.

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Can Mokkup and Vizzly be used together?

Absolutely. As we have mentioned earlier, there is a natural flow where the design team creates high-fidelity wireframes in Mokkup and then hands them off to the product and engineering team for implementation in Vizzly. Unlike other embedded analytics tools, Vizzly stands out by providing a comprehensive Theme API and component overrides, allowing for maximum alignment with your design system. This level of control empowers your frontend engineers to faithfully execute those beautiful Mokkup wireframes.