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Design for Your Audience: Personas and the Path of Inquiry
Before you choose charts or layout, understand who uses the dashboard, what they need to do with it, and whether to structure your app around personas or tasks. Designing for a specific audience keeps a dashboard focused and prevents it from becoming a catch-all.
Identify your personas
For each dashboard, define the people who use it.
- Their role and goals.
- The decisions they make and the questions they ask.
- Their familiarity with the data and with CRM Analytics.
- How often and on what device they view the dashboard.
Design for the path of inquiry
Most users move through three stages. Arrange the dashboard so that each stage flows into the next.
- Monitor. Answer "How are we doing?" at a glance with high-level measures at the top of the dashboard.
- Investigate. Let users ask "Why?" by drilling into supporting charts and applying filters.
- Act. Point users to the next step: open a record, apply a filter, or navigate to a related dashboard.
List the audience's questions in the order they'd naturally ask them, from high-level ("How are we doing?") to specific ("Which deals are at risk?"). For each question, identify the single metric that answers it and the action it should prompt. Drop widgets that don't map to a question or an action.
Structure the app for how people work
Organize dashboards in an app around either tasks or personas.
| Task-driven | Persona-driven | |
|---|---|---|
| Grouping | Group by the job to be done, such as pipeline review or forecast planning. | Group by audience, such as sales reps, managers, and executives. |
| Use when | Designing for one or two audiences. | Designing for three or more audiences. |
Choose the approach that matches how your audience navigates, and stay consistent within the app.
