revamping dashboard experiences

Decreased mean-time-to-resolution by 5% through a new flexible and accessible interface

I joined Sumo Logic with a strong interest in humanizing data. Sumo Logic offers real-time analytics that checks the infrastructure health of our most beloved apps like Airbnb.
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As Sumo Logic expanded to give insights on production workloads of increasing scales (Kubernetes), the current dashboard structure had limited visibility. A team at CBS had over 50+ dashboards just for monitoring the streaming of the Superbowl. Our tab navigation was hitting a breaking point too. I led a team to scale dashboards and to improve its overall usability and accessibility.
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In 2019, the company was also preparing for an IPO and going through a rebranding. A secondary goal of this project was to also incorporate elements of this rebranding to the product to cement our commitment to supporting the enterprise segment not just small mid size companies.

Team

Services

Date

ROLE

navigation

After observing our customers monitor systems during the super bowl by projecting dashboards on a wall in a triage room, I proposed collapsing the global navigation to give more visibility to the main protagonist, data. This also allowed users to browse through multiple dashboards more easily.

filters

It was a balancing act between visibility and simplicity to design filters that helped both the end user and content creators narrow down the scope of high cardinality data. Both needed to fine tune by specific categories and time. It was critical to make sure these controls didn’t get in the way of the dashboard’s core actions and minimized the visualizations.

charts

I redesigned the chart creation workflow to ease content creators’ experience when building complex visualizations. After testing different directions, the new layout gave creators more visibility to search, customization controls and preview the content.

design systems

I introduced data visualisation guidelines into our design system to develop a systematic approach to make all charts more accessible and consistent. This included grids, color systems and accessible type.

I enjoyed diving into a heavy data product. It challenge my interaction design skills.
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It was a humbling experience to shadow our customers using dashboards because I saw first hand the challenges of usability under different environments. Interaction with a dashboard on a displayed monitor versus interaction with a dashboard on a computer while handling multiple tools at once posed questions about when to prioritise skimming, comprehension and focus.
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With a newfound love for data, I was inspire to continue making more data products that are more delightful yet accessible.