Fostering Enterprise Conversations Around Data on Collaboration Platforms

TL;DR

This paper explores how enterprise professionals engage with data dashboards on collaboration platforms, identifying challenges and proposing design improvements to enhance communication and decision-making.

Contribution

It presents a co-design study with enterprise professionals and develops design recommendations for systems that improve data communication workflows.

Findings

Identified key challenges in dashboard engagement and retargeting.

Developed a comprehensive demonstration scenario for system design.

Formulated design recommendations to streamline data communication.

Abstract

In enterprise organizations, data-driven decision making processes include the use of business intelligence dashboards and collaborative deliberation on communication platforms such as Slack. However, apart from those in data analyst roles, there is shallow engagement with dashboard content due to insufficient context, poor representation choices, or a lack of access and guidance. Data analysts often need to retarget their dashboard content for those with limited engagement, and this retargeting process often involves switching between different tools. To inform the design of systems that streamline this work process, we conducted a co-design study with nine enterprise professionals who use dashboard content to communicate with their colleagues. We consolidate our findings from the co-design study into a comprehensive demonstration scenario. Using this scenario as a design probe, we interviewed 14 data workers to further develop our design recommendations.