Purpose
Operational dashboards had grown by accretion. Every request added a chart and nothing was ever removed. The redesign existed to make the surface answerable: one headline, a small set of measures, and a stated next action.
The problem
People opened the report, looked at whichever number they already cared about, and left. Aging, risk, and recovery lived in different places, so nobody could see the relationship between them. There was no stated conclusion, which meant every reader wrote their own, and they did not match.
The thinking
- Write the headline sentence first, then build only what supports it.
- Four summary measures at most. Beyond that people stop reading and start scanning.
- Color has to mean something. Risk red, recovery green, volume blue, human attention amber. If a color is decorative, remove it.
- Show the breakdown underneath the summary, in the same units, so a reader can check the headline rather than trust it.
- End with a recommendation strip. A dashboard with no next action is a status page.
- Design it to be read cold, by someone who missed the last three of these.
What was created
- 01
A headline-first layout
One plain sentence at the top stating the situation, with the rest of the surface arranged to support or qualify it.
- 02
A four-tile summary
Volume, aging, risk, and recovery, in that order, each one linked to the breakdown beneath it.
- 03
A semantic color system
A restrained palette where each color carries a fixed meaning across every report, so readers learn it once.
- 04
A recommendation strip
A fixed section at the bottom stating what should happen before the next read, with an owner.
Selected artifacts
Shared framework · The same structure also supports The Recurring Business Review System and Service Level Framework.
What it informed
- Set the pattern for the operational reporting used in the order operations and customer health work.
- Removed a meaningful amount of reporting that nobody could tie to a decision.
- Established the semantic color language used across the diagrams on this site.
Reflection
The most valuable step was deleting. Roughly half of what existed had no decision attached to it and disappeared without anyone noticing. The part I got wrong initially was assuming people would read the headline. They read the tiles first, which is why the tiles now have to agree with the sentence above them.