Reporting
Tracking the impact of resource reuse and exchange
Goal: Allow organizations to track their sustainability and procurement goals
My role: Researcher and project lead as Product Manager at Rheaply
Timeline: 1-2 month research spikes across 2 years, typical build time 1 month per report
My wins: Improving accuracy and legibility of reports leading to success stories like this one!

Overview
Rheaply is a resource exchange platform helping industry-leading organizations better visualize, quantify, and utilize their materials and resources so they can reach their sustainability goals. (2)
Reporting is a critical part of how this is accomplished, and reports on the Rheaply platform are primarily geared toward administrators who are responsible for their organization’s reuse program.
I was responsible for researching and directing an overhaul on Rheaply’s admin reporting. I oversaw changes to weight, value, carbon, and user engagement reports. The goal of the changes - ranging from new metrics to updated help text - aimed to illustrate how well reuse was working for an organization by making definitions and visualization of key metrics clearer.

At a glance: March 2023 update added embodied carbon avoided to a metrics dashboard on the Rheaply platform homepage (3)
Process
My team of product managers, UX designers, and software engineers began by trying to understand the state of existing reports holistically, so the initial research cast a wide net. Over the course of about a month, we interviewed and observed users as well as Rheaply’s customer success team, and did a competitive analysis on admin reports offered by other platforms. This led to a hypothesis roadmap defined by the most important themes we heard, such as user engagement or sustainability.
From there, changes to reports were rolled out in development sprints according to technical dependencies and further user research spikes. The effort for each change was different as some reports were built from scratch, others required redoing the existing API endpoints for new data calculations, and all received a facelift with new UI elements such as a date toggle or increased line smoothness to keep up with Rheaply’s latest brand guidelines.
We never stopped receiving and incorporating feedback from users. The product team increasingly co-researched and prototyped wireframes with the customer success team, who were already reviewing metrics in every check-in with administrators. This turned into an ongoing exercise with the User Insights Committee, a cross-functional collaboration for user research I led which later evolved to a dedicated Customer Advisory Board and covered many topics beyond reporting.
Design
Through common pain points surfaced in the research, we honed in on informational design elements that helped administrators more easily understand and make use of the reports.

Snapshot from September 2022 Product Corner sharing recent changes to how weight diversion is reported (4)
Each report’s design was defined with a user story that addressed how actions such as creating a post or exchanging an item - from chairs to pipettes - helped move the needle on a metric related to value, weight, carbon, or user engagement. The user stories per metric guided not only the design requirements but also illustrated what was most important to assess for an administrator. These were leveraged for Rheaply’s customer-facing help content (5), some excerpts below.
User engagement
Posts created
Gauge the level of engagement by looking at how often users create posts.
Value
Value available & recaptured
This section shows the replacement cost of your items available for exchange or recaptured due to an exchange.
Weight
Weight available
Visualize and track the total estimated weight of items on the platform that is available for reuse at any given time.
We also standardized the visual format for reports that always included:
Separating each metric into its own report;
Defining the main metric in the title;
Common filters for every graph to specify dates as well as compare points of data internal or external to the organization;
Summary cards for a snapshot of trends in the graph;
Interpretation help through tooltips and examples to answer, What is this report telling me?
Showing detail on calculations by sharing, How was this report made?
Ability to use a .csv file download button to further examine desired data points and easily share off-platform with the most relevant filters applied.
Outcome
Administrators are most often the champions of reuse at an organization. The metrics I helped define for Rheaply’s reporting helps provide the admins data to more clearly prove the case for reuse.
“To this date, we’ve estimated saving about 860 kilograms of carbon, which is equivalent to charging over 103 million smart phones. Right now, we have 781 users on the platform from Allina Health. We’ve been able to identify $226,000 in value and capture $107,000 in savings, which has led to 14,000 pounds of waste diverted from our reuse.” (6)
“Rheaply allows us to achieve sustainability and cost avoidance. One of our lab managers saved his department $6,000 by not buying new – and kept a heck of a lot of furniture out of the landfill” (7)
While my involvement in this project was fruitful and 2022 included: “3 new reports, reconfigured 4 existing reports, as well as provided the ability to download data of reports or listings in a .CSV file” (8), I am excited to continue to learn about best practices with data and develop my knowledge of sustainability standards in graduate school.
References