Making your data smarter: How we designed a new reporting tool for sustainability leaders

I take great pride in designing products that cater to customer needs. It’s my job to step inside their minds – spending time to understand who they are and how they think, and designing from the inside out. The right reporting tools are essential.

We first launched Analytics as a dashboard to help businesses understand the full picture of their facility performance, so they can track progress and act on their data. We released the first iteration of Analytics in spring of 2020, and several leading home goods and apparel brands joined as early adopters.

But this was just the first version. We consistently heard that Analytics didn’t provide enough context for businesses to put their sustainability data into action. In fact, Analytics accounted for 26% of all feedback collected and tracked by our customer success team. This is considerable, given the number of tools Higg supports across our platform. Analytics needed to tell a better story, but rather than designing an update based on a hunch, my team needed direction straight from our customers.

To make this overhaul possible, I joined forces with colleagues Niklas Lollo, our Principal Data Scientist, and Jamie Boos, our Director of Customer Success.

To identify opportunities for improvement, we focused less on our products and services, and more on overall user needs. We spoke to customers with an open mind. No script, free from attachment to a specific outcome. We approached the meetings as listening sessions: What does their day-to-day look like? How do they use the data? What types of decisions do they need to make? What are their workflows?

Higg is fortunate to work with organizations who were incredibly generous with their time and willing to sit down with us to share their experiences. After interviewing 6 companies over 10 hours, we came away inspired by the passion and commitment from the sustainability pioneers of the apparel industry.

We discovered that customers needed to:

• Demonstrate the value of their sustainability programs to stakeholders
• Quickly address the most critical issues in their value chain, by being able to prioritize issues based on severity and prevalence:
  • Identify compliance violations at individual facilities
  • Identify common pitfalls per impact area for products or supplier segments
• Identify areas of opportunity for investing in capability building and training

With fresh client conversations in mind, armed with insights and empathy, our interviewer team was able to represent customer needs throughout the entire development cycle. And importantly, we went back to our teams and built a refreshed understanding of our customers across the organization.

Above all, we heard that Analytics should support decision-making and enable customers to take action. So we refocused the tool to give users the lay of the land (performance), tell the heart of the story as well as the struggle (impact), and finally, the action (risks + opportunities). In essence, the update brings together modules from across a customers’ value chain, compiling results into simple, easy to digest charts and graphs, better supporting decision making, reporting, and honing areas for growth.