Canner
Redesign a data access workflow
2022/04~2022/08
Background
What is data access workflow
Imagine you are a data engineer or data analyst at a company. After communicating with the business team to understand their needs, you follow these steps:
Find the data: look for the data you need from various sources.
Analyze the data: clean and process the data to find useful insights.
Connect data from BI tools: create reports and visualizations to share your findings.
This is the data access workflow. A well-designed workflow makes data team and business team work more efficiently, and that’s exactly the product that Canner provides and what I designed.
Canner
Canner is a startup focusing on data access, and our goal is to enable businesses to access data on their own securely. Our product vision is empower your entire organization with self-service data access from anywhere.
My role
I am the founding product designer at Canner, leading end-to-end product design. I do these things in my daily work:
Research data market trends.
Conduct user interviews.
Share market trends and research insights with the team.
Communicate with the dev and sales team to explain why and what we designed.
Deliver product design strategies and craft UI.
Team
Here are the amazing colleagues who work together to create our products. We are a team that works remotely 80% of the time, with members from different cities in Taiwan and some in Malaysia.
CTO (PM): William Chang
Front-End: Freda Lai, Shimin Wong, Star You
Core Problems
Time-consuming to find tables and columns in each database/data warehouse
Our users have said that finding the data across databases is time-consuming due to the UI's requirement to navigate from a database list to a table list and then to a column list, which requires frequent page switches. You have to keep repeating step 1 to step 3.
Lack of business context for data
Data without business context is useless. Imagine a new team member trying to understand the column c_custkey. Without context, both data team and business team would waste significant time clarifying their requirements.
Lack of guidance in sharing data with third-party applications
We had previously implemented this key feature in the backend but did not display any information on the UI. A customer contacted our sales team saying, "I heard you introduce this feature before but where can I find it?" The answer is that we only wrote a feature introduction in the product feature documentation.
How do we research our core problems
Market
We are a startup in a hyper-growth market, competing with many big companies and other startups. We observe market trends and competitors' moves to find gaps. The less crowded areas offer the best opportunities.
Customer
We have conducted over 10 customer meetings with clients from various industries, including banking, manufacturing, retail, and e-commerce.
User
We have conducted 15+ user interviews with data engineers, data analysts, and business user to understand their pain points.
Make sure everyone is on the same page
After conducting research, we presented the customer journey map and product strategy to help our team understand the problems we aim to solve.
GoAL
Optimize the data access workflow to provide a smoother user experience to enhance efficiency for data team and business team.
Design Principle
Design for discoverability
Show all the resources (database/table/column) the user needs to manage, share, and access.
Search beyond resource name. Allow user to explore and discover data within its business context for enhanced clarity and insight.
Display how to share data with third-party application information.
Understandable business context
Design for consistency
Our front-end engineers and I define reusable UI components for enterprise-level products and open-source projects to ensure a consistent experience and enhance development efficiency.
DeliverableS
Navigation hub for your all data
We redesigned our sidebar from a function list to a data list because we believe that data is the key and the most important element of the UI. With this sidebar, users can easily and quickly find the resources (database/data warehouse) they have. Just click the list item, and you can navigate to the resource details page.
Add business metadata for your data then search for it
We allow users to add business metadata to their resources (data warehouse, table, column) and easily search for it.
Share data with third-party applications
We added guidance to show users how to share data with third-party applications and what connection parameters they need. They can copy this information directly.
Outcome
Boost 80% data analytics productivity
In the past, business teams required at least 5 working days to access data. Now, with this new process, business teams can self-service their data needs within a single day. This significant improvement boosts productivity by 80%, empowering teams to make faster, data-driven decisions.
Takeaway
Do not be afraid to do the hard things
As a founding product designer in this team, all things are new and challenging. There was no figma file only codebase, no design process. I had to build all the design stuff from 0 to 1. Starting from signing up a Figma account, building the first frame, components, layouts, pages, processes, and so on. Our product’s domain knowledge is highly technical. It is complex and hard for me at the beginning. All I did was dive deep into data knowledge, follow data experts and data companies on Twitter, and register for their conferences. Learning how they talk and think has always helped me a lot. I learned SQL and played the other data company’s product. By doing this, I can exactly know any data terms in the data world.
Design is a teamwork
Our dev team is my best design partners. During design meetings, they always provide feedback from various perspectives. It feels great to discuss and make decisions together for product design because you know you are not alone; you work with great peers to build a meaningful product.
Do the most important things at the right time
We have several product design ideas for the data access workflow on our to-do list, but limited resources and time. As Steve Jobs said, "Focus is about saying no.” How to find the balance between time, resources, constraints, and goals is really important, I learned that prioritization is very crucial for the team to speed up and focus on the right thing to do.
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