Case Study:
Nonprofit
Dashboard
RiseKit is a workforce development platform connecting workers with the right training, resources, and job opportunities at the right time. The platform serves employers, community organizations, and jobseekers navigating the workforce.
How can a redesigned user dashboard help “The Visitor Relationship Management Company” deepen their relationship with clients?
The Team
I led design on this project in collaboration with a product manager and the head of product.
Timeline and Tools
We completed this project in 4 weeks across 3 agile sprints and presented our progress to the client through meetings held at the end of each sprint. We conducted ideation workshops in Miro, leveraged Vercel for rapid concept generation and prototyping, and used Figma as the primary design tool to carry designs from wireframes to high-fidelity mockups.
My Role
User Interviews and Concept Testing
I moderated interviews and usability test sessions with our client’s users and recruited additional prospective users who aligned with the target audience. I also audited interviews and tests moderated by other members of my team to transcribe and take notes. Product Marketing
I coined key narrative terms that shaped the delivery of this user experience, utilizing key phrases from the user research to leverage terminology that resonated with our research participants’ goals for the user experience. Wireframing and High-Fidelity Mockups
I created every stage of the designs for this project in Figma, using our generated concepts as a reference to draft the inital wireframes, the initial set of MVP designs, and the final iterative high-fidelity mockups after collecting user feedback.What’s My Universe Today?
A Compass for Career Navigators
The existing navigator experience was fragmented. Features were siloed, there were no consistent value loops across the platform, and staff engagement was low.
In practice, navigators patched their workflows together with spreadsheets, Google Docs, and Airtable — tools RiseKit was supposed to replace.
The core tension: navigators are chronically understaffed, often covering multiple roles simultaneously, with no room to delegate. A tool that adds friction doesn't get used. RiseKit was seen as a "nice to have" rather than a genuine daily driver.
Decrease Clicks
Clients manage their Admiral account with a web-based dashboard that provides a control panel and a variety of relevant analytics for each service. Though frequent dashboard logins are not strictly necessary to recover traffic revenue, the availible resources can help users evaluate and improve their strategy to increase earnings.
Admiral’s motivation for a redesign was a low rate of user engagement with the dashboard relative to the size of their client base. Clients generally had a positive opinion the company’s services, but few regularly used the dashboard.
To address this, Admiral asked us to create a unified home dashboard featuring resources from each individual service’s dashboard page.
User Goals
Here’s what Admiral specifically wanted the design to address and provide:
- Focus on Client Relationships - Encourage current clients who use just one service to consider upgrading and encourage potential clients to sign up for product updates, request a demo, or upgrade to a paid account
- User Engagement - Entice users to create a profile, access the dashboard website regularly, and recommend the service to others
- Onboarding - In addition to delivering a dashboard design, Admiral asked us to develop a comprehensive onboarding flow to guide users through the redesign and acquaint them with the new dashboard experience.
Gathering Research Insights
User Research
Obviously, we wouldn’t be able to fully address the needs of Admiral’s users unless we communicated with them directly. We conducted user interviews with 5 professionals who use Admiral for work in departments like ad sales, subscription coordination, and digital marketing at online publications.
We were particularly interested in how Admiral’s services impact the jobs of users on a daily basis, as well as their opinions on the current dashboard design. These were our biggest takeaways:
Navigators Wear Too Many Hats
Programs are rarely fully staffed. Staff regularly absorb responsibilities outside their job description, meaning the dashboard needed to flex across roles, not just serve one.The Dashboard is a Middle-Man
Many users pay a brief visit to the dashboard to isolate data relevant to their objectives and export it to another platform. Though this raw data is crucial to their professional responsibilities, they rely resrouces provided by other platforms to analyze and leverage this data.Lack of Feature and Product Visibility
Our interviews indicated that the current dashboard didn’t communicate the potential that Admiral services or any of their particular features have to increase revenue. Users understood the value of the service they used most often, but not how other products could further serve their interests.
- Navigators wear too many hats.
- Every login starts with the same question. Navigators wanted an immediate, structured answer to "What's my universe today?" — who needs attention, what's outstanding, what's next.
- The platform should act like a personal assistant. Navigators didn't want to hunt for information. They wanted proactive notifications and priority-sorted views that removed the cognitive work of triaging their day.
- Small friction compounds fast. Navigating to the same features repeatedly added up to 30+ minutes a day. Reducing clicks to high-frequency tasks was a meaningful unlock.
- Workarounds signal unmet needs. Nearly every navigator maintained a parallel spreadsheet or Google Doc. Eliminating that dependency — or at least shrinking it — was a clear north star.
Forging a Design Path
Defining the Problem
This diagram visualized a critical insight from our research: Admiral user satisfaction was driven mostly through interactions with Customer Support, and rarely through positive experiences with the dashboard. Users of all types and touchpoints rely on customer service representatives to compensate for the dashboard’s usability issues.
This insight allowed us to articulate the problem our design would address:
Approaching the Solution
We now had a clear-cut design objective: by emulating the qualities that define positive experiences with Customer Love, we could help users feel comfortable navigating the dashboard without help, expand their understanding of both the services they already use and other services Admiral offers, and ultimately increase interest in upgrading to additional services within the product suite.
We established four design principles to inform the direction of our project:
