Invesco Cloud Usage Dashboard

In one week, I designed a dashboard concept with an interactive prototype to pitch a new product.

Role:

Lead UI Designer

Team:

1 UX Designer, 1 Product Manager

Tools:

Figma

Skills:

UI Design, Data Visualization, Prototyping

Overview

The Publicis Sapient team designed and pitched a new product to the client in one week. The Invesco CFO requested an interactive dashboard to track the company's cloud spend. The dashboard needed to be data-rich, scannable, and friendly.

The Ask

Our dashboard needed to display trends and determine the business value of cloud spend to help our users make important financial and technical decisions.

In addition to the high-level dashboard, we created a business unit-specific breakdown of cloud usage for the Tech and Services division of Invesco. Invesco asked us to take inspiration from utility bills with a graphic breakdown explaining cloud spending. The dashboard needed to be both data-rich and friendly; interactive and scannable. As with all dashboard designs, we needed to strike the right balance to sell our idea.

The Sprint

To tackle this challenge, I worked closely with a UX designer to create a friendly visual breakdown of cloud spend. I flexed my data-visualization skills to create an interactive Figma prototype and presented my work to the Invesco CFO. Overall, it was an exciting and challenging project, and I'm proud of the work we accomplished in just one week.

Our overall approach was to keep customization and scalability at the forefront of the design. We showed how our consultants might approach data visualization in a dashboard while hinting at the potential opportunities for new features.

Final Prototype

The design is card based and scalable to allow for expanded features in future iterations. We want the user to be able to customize the arrangement and visibility of cards as well as the content within each widget. Filters also allow for customization and focus.

We included widgets to visualize trend data and AI predictions for future spend. We want users to be able to scan and comprehend data trends, but also have the option to dive deeper to understand the nitty gritty. Throughout the dashboard, we leverage interactive elements to create a bite-snack-meal approach to a data-heavy product.

The cloud onboarding progress widget illustrates how customizable some of this data might be for the user. If this user is most interested in the current state of completed and in-progress applications, a bar graph showing the totals for each category will be most useful for them. But another user might want to see how these applications have progressed over time, in which case a timeline view of how many applications have been completed in the past six months or year might be more useful to illustrate the pace of the progress being made.

We leveraged hover interactions to make this chart more friendly, informative, and inviting. We want users to get the bigger picture at first glance and then encourage them to look closer to get the details. Adding satisfying interactions entices the user to get more information and explore the interface.

The Presentation

The culmination of this work came with the client presentation. There, I explained the importance of design principles while stressing the business value of the product and potential for a future partnership.

Key Takeaways

With such a condensed timeline, it was crucial that we leverage key assumptions and best practices in dashboard design. While we had a lot of data to pull from, we had no access to our primary users — the CFO and his leadership team — for research. So, we kept things simple, distilled information into easy-to-read charts for trend visualization, and always defaulted to customizability. Each widget was designed to be scalable to different audiences, with built-in filter controls, rearrangeable cards, and presentation options. Due to the sprint's constraints, we prioritized what is possible with a great framework rather than building out individual widgets to full functionality.

Overall, this sprint was a valuable experience for honing my data visualization and UI design skills while in a fast-paced environment. I enjoyed having much ownership over this project as one of two primary designers, which was especially rewarding when I was trusted to present the work to the client. I'm eager to see the project's future developments and look forward to tackling more challenging projects that foster my growth as a visual designer.