BigBoard

BigBoard is a customer service analytics dashboard that allows the analyst to drill in to different aspects of customer service per Microsoft product.

Fluent for Analytics

There weren’t any examples of Fluent being used at Microsoft for enterprise style software, so the usability was pretty unknown at this time. We needed to quickly test our information architecture inside of a Fluent environment and see what kinds of pain points in navigation would arise. I built some low fidelity concepts that show the side menu interacting with the main content.

Fluent L1 Menu Collapsed

Fluent L1 and Notes Panel Expanded

It was important to show this because throughout the application, the user would be adding annotations and adjusting filters with a right panel. This view shows how much content can be viewed by the user while performing these actions. Needless to say we were going to have to come up with a custom solution to continue using Fluent, since too much of the main content was being covered by this panel.

Same Design Patterns, but in MWF

Next we needed to test the same patterns in Microsoft Web Framework to see the difference in usability. By this time I had more information on the different types of content that would be displayed so these are slightly higher fidelity.

This framework was highly effective in showing the most amount of content at once and allowed for multiple levels of navigation without limiting how many tiles we can spread across the screen. MWF uses a top to bottom style navigation hierarchy which is more familiar in enterprise software, but doesn’t lend itself well to long list of links as that would require a second line or horizontal scrolling.

The right panel doesn’t overlay on main content in MWF and offers a good amount of room for easy readability of the notes while allowing the user to view content in the center area.

Decided On Fluent