Devin LuBean

Product Design Leader

Domo Bricks

TLDR, I had a pet project that after working with the team became a major feature that helps customers create a custom content block that could inject anything built with HTML/JS natively into a dashboard. Below you can see the announcement video for Domo Bricks (originally called DDX Bricks) that I wrote and did the animations for. And you can read the background of the project below the video.

Several years ago I worked to develop a consulting SKU for Domo that allowed customers to purchase UX Designer time to help them make smarter content.  I worked on many of these projects, and managed distributing the work amongst all the designers.  On many of the projects I discovered that while Domo has over 200 charts types, customers often had a chart they preferred or customization that was beyond our built in charts.  I also ran into many situations where customers wanted to do something with their data that was not a chart per se, but was a highly custom piece of content that used data to power it, like data driven titles and paragraphs, or content feeds, or dynamic graphics.  Domo’s built in tool, Stories, wasn’t able to do this because of it’s focus on simple drag and drop UI.  And our custom application framework required using Node, and a CLI which was a no for me on usability.  I wanted something that would allow people out there that know enough about HTML/JS to tweak it a bit to do what they want, or build a custom visualization using a library like D3, but wanted nothing to do with using the terminal and complex deployment and code management strategies.

In our user research I was amazed to find that there were way more users that fit that description than I realized.  I campaigned with several leaders and convinced them to let me work with our visualization expert Chris Willis, and our visualization engineering team on proving out a solution that would allow users to edit the HTML/JS of a piece of content on a dashboard, and have access to the data platform to allow for data visualizations and data elements.  The team did an amazing job, and Domo Bricks was a huge success.  I don’t think I’ve seen user adoption of a feature so fast at Domo before.