Insights
Revolutionizing Data Reporting in the Energy Industry
Role
- UX Team Manager
- Lead Designer
- Researcher
Team
- 2 UI Developers
- 3 UX Designers
- 2 Product Managers
- 2 Data Engineers
Tools
- Figma
- Illustrator
- VS Code
- Storybook
Timeline
- 1 year
- Sept. 2024
(v1.0)
Growth Without Cohesion
When the company launched its first offering nearly 30 years ago, it was a niche software platform tailored to a small segment of the energy industry. Over time, new products were introduced, transforming the company into a multi-tier enterprise software solution. However, this rapid expansion, primarily led by engineers and developers, introduced significant usability challenges.
As the company scaled, silos in software development emerged, with different teams working independently on various products. Without cross-functional collaboration, each group built solutions in isolation, leading to divergent design patterns, inconsistent user flows, and fragmented experiences. The lack of a cohesive design strategy meant that products evolved separately, often prioritizing functionality over usability. As a result, users faced unreliable and inefficient workflows, struggling to navigate an ecosystem that lacked standardized interaction models.
This fragmentation became particularly evident in data management and reporting workflows. Users were often forced to manually update data, refresh pages, or run additional processes to ensure changes were properly reflected. These inefficiencies led to instability, errors, and frustration, ultimately affecting productivity and decision-making. Without a unified approach to UX and system architecture, the software became increasingly difficult to scale and maintain.
The Challenge
Streamline Reporting Across a Fragmented Ecosystem in 1 Year
Goal: Build a centralized, intuitive solution to simplify managing fragmented reporting tools.
Given a tight one-year deadline, we prioritized building a platform that was scalable, flexible, and user-friendly. Our mission was to deliver a reporting platform that was not just functional but transformative and empowered users to easily customize their data views and generate reports without extensive training or workarounds.
Key Improvements
- Centralize and Simplify: Eliminate the fragmented reporting experience by consolidating data and workflows into a single platform.
- Empower Through Reusability: Using component driven design, build a system of reusable, modular components to allow users to customize dashboards and reports effortlessly.
- Boost Productivity: Enable users to access and analyze their data quickly, reducing time spent on tedious tasks.
- Ensure Scalability: Create a platform that could grow with the business, supporting new features and evolving user needs without disrupting existing functionality.
Discovery
Internal Research: Laying the Foundation
“We are sitting on tons of unorganized raw data. The challenge is for us to provide insights to customers that help them operate their business more effectively.”
- CTO
Our initial UX research focused on engaging with internal subject matter experts (SMEs) to understand existing products and capabilities. Structured interviews and collaborative sessions highlighted critical pain points, such as fragmented workflows, inconsistent data accessibility, and complex reporting processes.
This foundational research provided a comprehensive understanding of the ecosystem, revealing strengths like robust data integrations and analytics while identifying usability gaps. These insights shaped ambitious goals to not only address weaknesses but also reimagine the user experience.
Discovery
External Research: Understanding User Needs
Through a rigorous UX research process, including decision intelligence mapping, contextual inquiries, and in-depth discussions with users, we gained a clear understanding of the challenges they faced daily. This approach allowed us to map their workflows from upstream to downstream, highlighting the systems and tools they used, the decisions they made, and how they navigated complex processes. Observing users in their natural environments revealed critical inefficiencies in handling fragmented data and disjointed tools.
We also conducted participatory design exercises where users outlined their ideal workflows and identified key frustrations. These sessions provided actionable insights into inefficiencies such as manual processes and data silos that hindered productivity and scalability. These findings laid the groundwork for defining our design priorities, ensuring we tackled both immediate pain points and long-term needs.
Key Insights
- Data Overload & Fragmentation: Users struggled to consolidate and interpret data from multiple tabs and tools, making it difficult to extract meaningful insights efficiently.
- Limited Customization & Flexibility: There was no flexible way to create interactive, customized dashboards and reports, restricting users from tailoring data views to their specific needs.
- Scalability Challenges: The lack of reusable components hindered efficiency, making it harder to scale solutions across the platform without unnecessary duplication of effort.
Deep Dive
The Value of UX Research
Thorough UX research enriches the design process, driving meaningful innovation and ensuring that the solutions we create truly align with the needs of those who use them. Without it, the design process may miss key insights that are vital for creating impactful and user-centered experiences.
I’ve written a separate detailed UX research project outlining the process we used for this project.
Analysis
Transforming Research into Actionable Insights
Following the initial UX research phases, our analysis highlighted the need for a flexible, reusable, and user-centric design process. Initially, the focus was on creating a powerful reporting tool to address user frustrations with fragmented workflows. However, as the design evolved, we saw an opportunity to expand the platform’s capabilities. The modular components built for reports could also be repurposed for real-time, dynamic dashboards, giving users the tools to monitor key information and make informed decisions throughout their day. This led to the creation of Insights, a cohesive product integrating reporting and dashboard tools into a single platform.
User research also revealed that some customers preferred accessing data through external tools like Tableau or Power BI. These users wanted to extract and transform data into their own business intelligence (BI) tools. This insight drove us to design Insights with seamless data export and integration, ensuring flexibility for diverse workflows.
At the core of Insights was component-driven design, a system of reusable, modular components that allowed users to tailor dashboards and reports while maintaining consistency and scalability. This approach not only ensured a cohesive user experience but also accelerated development, making it easier to introduce new features and adapt to evolving customer needs.
Design
Iterative Design Approach
The success of the Insights platform was built on an iterative design process that prioritized user input, cross-functional collaboration, and ongoing refinement. This method ensured that each design decision was thoughtfully aligned with user needs, business goals, and technical feasibility.
By embracing an iterative approach, we minimized risk, optimized workflows, and delivered a polished product within the constraints of a tight one-year timeline.
Low-Fidelity
Building a Foundation
Wireframes enabled rapid iteration, allowing stakeholders and SMEs to validate structure early. Feedback identified workflow bottlenecks, leading to refinements before moving to higher fidelity.
Core Refinements
- User Flows: Mapped navigation paths for key tasks, such as building dashboards or generating reports.
- Component Layouts: Defined placement and hierarchy for essential elements like chart widgets, KPI indicators, and global filters.
- Interaction Design: Outlined basic interactions, including drag-and-drop functionality for dashboard components.
Prototyping
Bringing Designs to Life
After validating wireframes, we transitioned to interactive prototypes that simulated real user interactions.
Benefits
- Usability Testing: Allowed users to engage with the platform and provide feedback on functionality, interaction patterns, and workflows.
- Stakeholder Alignment: Demonstrated how the design translated business goals into tangible features, such as customizable dashboards and dynamic reports.
- Technical Feasibility: Collaborated with developers to ensure that the designs were achievable within technical constraints.
Feedback Loops
Driving Continuous Improvement
Refining Through Continuous Feedback
Continuous feedback was at the heart of our iterative design approach. Each iteration was informed by insights gathered from key stakeholders and end-users, ensuring the design evolved based on real needs.
By the end of the process, more than a dozen iterations had been completed for core workflows, resulting in a highly polished, user-friendly platform.
User-Centered Research & Validation
- Usability Testing: Conducted sessions with internal stakeholders and external end-users to evaluate design effectiveness and interaction clarity.
- Contextual Inquiries: Observed users in their work environments, both onsite and virtually, to uncover their pain points and workflow challenges.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Worked closely with product managers, developers, and subject matter experst (SMEs) to align designs with business objectives and technical feasibility.
Key Improvements
- Enhanced Dashboard Customization: Users requested greater flexibility in resizing and arranging components, leading to the implementation of adjustable grid layouts.
- Optimized Reporting Workflows: Early testing showed difficulty combining datasets, so we introduced pre-built templates and guided workflows to streamline the process.
- Improved Visual Hierarchy: Feedback revealed low visibility in some areas, prompting the addition of color coding and iconography for better clarity.
Bringing It All Together
How It Works
Insights delivers a fully customizable experience, allowing users to interact with their data in ways that enhance efficiency and understanding.
Build Dashboards
Drag and drop components like charts, KPI widgets, and filters.
Generate Reports
Combine datasets with visual and text components for detailed analysis.
Export & Share
Share insights with stakeholders via multiple export options.
Key Benefits
- Flexibility: Customizable dashboards and reports for unique needs.
- Reusability: Modular components reduce redundancy.
- Scalability: New components can be added, and existing components can be edited or cloned, without disrupting the system.
- Efficiency: Centralized workflows save time and improve productivity.
Impact and Results
Metrics
50%
Reduction in time spent gathering and consolidating data.
30%
Improvement in overall user satisfaction scores.
80%
Adoption rate for users upgrading to the new product.
Reflection & Takeaways
This project reinforced the value of UX research in uncovering user needs and highlighted the importance of component driven design for creating scalable solutions. By listening to users and iterating continuously, we delivered a product that transformed how energy professionals interact with their data. It also emphasized the importance of cross-functional collaboration to balance user-centered design with technical feasibility.
“Insights saves us hours each week—we can finally focus on analyzing data rather than finding it.”
- CAISO Market Manager
“The ability to customize dashboards makes our workflows seamless.”
