Tools used:
Whiteboard, Pens, Paper, Sketch App

Description:
I had a mission to rethink how our customers access their reporting data for faster and better outcomes. To do this we needed ideas to make the product more accessible in finding the right data. I put together a discovery workshop with my lead researcher and visual designer. We invited stakeholders and other department folks to join in from Customer Success, Support, Development and Product. Here is my summary.

Data Discovery Workshop for Jet Reports

The Problem

‍Victoria, the Report Designer doesn't know where to find the field she is looking for. She knows what type of information she needs, but not the field name or table name per se. Victoria needs a way to more quickly and easily find the field that will produce the data she needs.

The Activities

Solution Brainstorming
Individually, everyone writes down as many solutions to the problem that they can think of, off of the top of their heads.
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‍Sketching
Forming cross-functional pairs, participants choose one or more ideas to sketch on a whiteboard.
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‍Present & Design Critique
Pairs present their ideas to the group, and all participants have a chance to contribute comments and questions.
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‍Impact & Effort Evaluation
Place ideas on a matrix to estimate their relative impact and effort, in order to clarify product prioritization decisions.

Results of Participant Brainstorming & Sketching

Metadata
Metadata could give users a broader set of information to search, sort, and filter by. It could also be used to present the users with less information to dig through. This meta-data may apply to reports, tables, and fields.

Business Categories
Within metadata, the concept of 'Business Categories' was brought up multiple times. Metadata could help to organize reports, tables and fields in a way that is already familiar to the user, like by business function or role. Scott suggested inferring business categories from the role centers in NAV. Some examples of potential business categories included Sales, Finance, and Inventory.Amy and Hughes suggested that the NL function could be filtered by business category. For example, if the user opened a "NLSales()" function, the function wizard would only display tables and fields relevant to a sales report.

‍Image: Hughes and Amy - Filter Tables by Type, and NLSales()

Popular Tables & Fields
Another type of metadata would indicate which tables and fields are most commonly used in reports. This would limit the set of total information available to choose from to just information the average user is likely to choose from. One group suggested this could work like the 'Favorites' feature, but that this classification could be pre-defined by Jet Reports.

Organize by Type
Matt and Sarah suggested that fields could be filtered by data type, so if the user knew that what they were looking for was a text, number, or date field, they could filter to see fields of only that type.Hughes and Amy suggested that tables could be organized by whether they were classified as a base table or a transaction table.

‍Image: Matt and Sarah - Filter Fields by Type

Custom Metadata
Multiple groups stated that it would be good to pre-define metadata, but let users customize the metadata, like for example, to create their own business categories. Brian suggested that users could also modify which tables and fields belonged in which business categories.

Wireframe
Below is a mock up illustrating how the various types of metadata could be used in the Browser or Jet Function Wizard.

Artificial Intelligence
With AI, the software obscures the complexity needed to produce a report so that the user can communicate in human or business terms, instead of in database terms.

Natural Language
SearchThe concept of natural language search was primary in two groups' ideas (Matt and Sarah, as well as Sam and Bryan). In a natural language search, the software would be able to read questions worded however the user writes normally, and would make intelligent guesses about what report that user wants.

‍Here were some examples from the brainstorm:

• "How many customers bought pink flamingos last month?"
• "What's in our Australian warehouses right now?"
• "I want sales by month by salesperson"
• "I need a fixed asset report that shows depreciation by month"
• "I want a balance sheet for the current fiscal year"
• "I want an A/R aging report"
• "Outstanding invoices with a due date next month"
• "I want to see item sales by category, grouped by customer & territory"

Image: Matt and Sarah - The "Magic Box"

Another idea related to this was displaying web/help results so the user could go learn how to do the thing they are requesting. This would search all of our web properties and bring back relevant results.

Clarifying/Refining Questions
Sam and Bryan commented that the users may sometimes ask questions that are too vague for an AI to produce a useful report. In this case, they suggested, the AI could ask the user to make clarifying choices, for example, if a user types "I want a balance sheet", the software could respond "What year do you want?"

‍Image: Sam & Bryan - The "Digital Jet Guru"

Scott and Brian described another use for the software asking questions. Instead of clarifying natural language search, these series of questions would help the software make decisions to structure a report.

‍For example, it could ask a series of questions like:

• Do you want to make a list? (Y/N)
• Of what? (Customers;Documents;Items)
• Do you want to make another list? (Y/N)
  
• Of what? (Document No., Item)...etc
  
• What additional data do you want to show in this list? (Name;City;State)
  

Image: Brian & Scott - The "Jet Application"

Templates
Ideas that involved artificial intelligence implied that the software could make use of templates to make intelligent guesses about how the report should be structured, which fields are related and should be included together, and common row and column formats based on the type of report.

Live Preview
Ideas that involved a report building tool suggested that the user should be able to view a preview to get timely feedback on their choices, and be given a chance to change their choices.

Brian and Scott said that to be able to do this report building effectively, the application would need to live outside of Excel, and include the option to send the resulting report to Excel.

Linking Tables
One major issue related to finding data involves finding data that lives on a different table than the table which contains the first field the user selected.
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Highlighting Foreign Keys
Matt and Sarah suggested indicating within a list which fields could serve as a key to link tables together.

Automatically Offer to Include Related Fields from Other Tables
Bryan suggested that the software could abstract table linking one degree further by suggesting fields from other tables that are commonly used in combination with the field the user just selected, and offer to add these, taking care of linking the tables on the back end.

Other ideas
These ideas were generated during brainstorming, but didn't appear in sketches or discussions.

• Search filtering in the browser
  
• Right click to learn about a table in browser
  
• Add-in to NAV to show a field's table there
  
• Show related tables in database when a table is selected
  
• Place to look up database schema and see table and field relationships
  
• Help chat
• Generate a Jet Function for a selected field in NAV
  
• In Browser, display the NAV page where the table or field is used
  
• In-product tutorial
  
• Export table/field info from browser
  

Results of Impact/Effort Prioritization
In addition to evaluating the impact and effort of these ideas, we identified themes for ideas, which are color-coded below.

Output
One of the projects we picked up out of this workshop was redesigning the UI and experience for Browser tool within the Excel Add-In.

BEFORE

AFTER