Dashboard De-cluttering: Deep Dive Discovery Moderated Interviews for Integration Planning
When the dashboards say everything, they also say nothing. Informed the product roadmap by pinpointing which data points truly mattered to users—ensuring dashboards were actionable, not overwhelming.
Hands pointing at dashboard elements.
Overview
I co-led discovery research to inform a complex product integration, conducting moderated interviews with a highly specialized user group. I managed targeted recruitment, synthesized nuanced qualitative data, and facilitated workshops to align stakeholders. This project showcased my skills in discovery methods, complex synthesis, and strategic storytelling, ultimately guiding leadership’s integration planning.
Context
Sometimes, the question isn’t “should we build this?”, it’s “how should we build it?”. In this project, Stakeholders were aligned on the need to integrate a widely used third-party platform with our software. The challenge wasn’t deciding if, but uncovering what and why. What data mattered most to users? What workflows would benefit from the integration? And how could we ensure it added real value rather than complexity?
This research took place within a Fortune 100 company as part of a strategic initiative to evaluate a potential integration between two complex digital products. The integration was already a strategic priority, but leadership needed clarity on the details of, which data from the external system should be surfaced within our platform to support user workflows. Because this integration was highly specialized, the research required a focused and disciplined approach to uncover whether the opportunity was viable, valuable, and aligned with real user needs.
My Role
In discovery work, curiosity is your compass. I joined the project as a core member of the research team. Together, we designed a study that could navigate ambiguity, surface user needs, and translate those into strategic clarity.
My contributions included:
Designing the research plan and discussion guide
Leading participant recruitment to ensure industry and domain relevance
Conducting moderated interviews with a niche user group
Synthesizing data into actionable insights and creating report materials
Co-presenting insights to leadership
Facilitating a stakeholder workshop to translate research themes into integration scenarios
Methods
Discovery research is like detective work. You follow clues, ask the right questions, and listen closely to what’s said (and what’s not). For this project, I focused on uncovering user attitudes and behaviors through direct conversation. Moderated interviews provided us with the space to explore not only what users did, but also why they did it and what they needed from a future integration.
I conducted 10 remote moderated interviews with highly specialized users to explore their attitudes, workflows, and expectations around integrating two complex platforms. These sessions were attended by product and design team members. These conversations helped us understand not only what data users wanted to see in our system, but also how they envisioned using it in real-world scenarios.
Research Goals
Understand how professionals in the target industry interact with a key third-party platform slated for integration.
Uncover the critical tasks, data needs, and roles involved to ensure the integration supports real workflows and delivers user value.
My Research Process for Moderated Interviews
Define the problem
Hold backlog meetings to confirm the business challenge and determine if interviews are the right approach.
Establish preliminary research goals and success criteria.
2. Align with stakeholders
Facilitate collaborative workshops with product and design partners to define project scope, business goals, research objectives, desired learning outcomes, and timelines.
Capture alignment in a shared whiteboarding tool for transparency.
3. Build the research plan
Develop a detailed plan including background, context, finalized goals, methods, recruitment approach, and study materials. For example, make a discussion guide.
4. Review and refine
Partner with product owners and designers to review and iterate on the research plan.
5. Recruit and schedule
Identify and screen participants, ensuring relevance to the research goals.
Coordinate scheduling, send confirmations and reminders, and follow up with thank-yous to maintain engagement and professionalism.
6. Conduct interviews: Moderate sessions using industry best practices:
TEDW (Tell me, Explain, Describe, Walk me through) prompts.
Empathetic listening to build trust and encourage openness.
Probing and laddering techniques to uncover deeper motivations.
Neutral facilitation to reduce bias and allow participants’ perspectives to emerge fully.
7. Quality check
Review recordings and notes to ensure data integrity and completeness.
8. Analyze the data
Upload transcripts, notes, and recordings to the research repository.
Apply both company-wide tags and a tailored tagging system for nuanced synthesis.
9. Synthesize insights
Translate findings into actionable insights, engaging product and design partners throughout to ensure recommendations are relevant and feasible.
10. Create deliverables
Produce research outputs such as repository summaries, presentations, and project-specific artifacts (e.g., personas, journey maps, or opportunity areas).
11. Peer review
Validate findings and deliverables with a fellow researcher for rigor and clarity.
12. Share and discuss
Present findings to the core project team, facilitating discussions around each recommendation.
Lead a prioritization workshop to translate insights into action items.
13. Broader communication
Share outcomes with the wider organization via Teams, Viva Engage posts, or other communication channels.
14. Ongoing engagement
Continue conversations with stakeholders through follow-ups, surveys, and check-ins to track impact and surface new research opportunities.
Tools
Dovetail – Research repository and qualitative analysis
Miro/ Mural/ Figjam – Stakeholder alignment, prioritization workshops
Microsoft Suite – Copilot, Planner, Outlook, PowerPoint, SharePoint, Teams
Calendly – Participant scheduling and coordination
Camtasia – Video editing and highlight reel creation
Timeline
Working on this project alongside other responsibilities meant managing time carefully and staying focused on what mattered most. Recruitment was the biggest lift, and finding the right voices took persistence and precision.
6-week timeline (while balancing other projects):
Recruitment (2+ weeks): Finding the right participants was the most time-intensive part. We needed users with dual-platform experience and industry-specific knowledge, which required targeted outreach and careful screening.
Interviewing (2 weeks): Conducted 10 remote moderated sessions across multiple time zones and industries.
Synthesis & Reporting (2 weeks): Analyzed qualitative data, identified key insights and recommendations, and prepared materials for a presentation to stakeholders and strategy workshops.
Challenges
This project felt like running a relay on a winding track full of handoffs, hurdles, and unexpected turns. From recruiting a niche user group to guiding stakeholders toward clarity, I had to stay agile, pace myself, and keep the baton moving forward.
Clearing the first hurdle: Recruiting a hard-to-reach audience with dual-platform expertise and specific industry backgrounds required persistence.
Maintaining momentum: Balancing short timelines with the depth of discovery research needed to inform a strategic decision meant staying focused and efficient.
Passing the baton: Helping stakeholders move from abstract integration ideas to user-anchored scenarios through workshops and guided discussions ensured alignment across the team.
Running both lanes: Ensuring the research findings resonated at both the tactical level for design team members and at the strategic level for leadership meant tailoring insights for different audiences.
Strategic storytelling matters: Presenting to leadership was an exercise in tailoring insights for different audiences—bridging the gap between user needs and business decisions.
Outcomes & Impact
In research, clarity is often the most valuable deliverable. My role was to help product owners see through the noise and focus on what truly mattered to users. This research formed the justification and basis for the product strategy going forward. By grounding discussions in user perspectives, the study:
Helped product owners understand which data points were truly valuable to users so that the dashboards would be actionable, not cluttered. Reducing the amount of data on a single card within the dashboard by 25%.
Informed the product roadmap through planning meetings and early feature development, where I clarified customer expectations and workflows related to the integration.
Validated Assumptions that were critical to the business line and uncovered 14 critical iterations, which each then spawned new research projects.
