Fewer Screens, Clearer Product
Notes from a dashboard redesign where most of the work was taking things away.
The brief asked for a new dashboard. I started with the screens people actually used, and we ended the redesign with fewer of them than we started with.
Start with What People Open
Analytics told a simple story: most people opened the same three views, every day, in the same order. Everything else was visited during onboarding and then forgotten. The navigation treated all of it as equal.
Merge Before You Redesign
Two of the three daily views showed the same data from different angles. Combining them into one screen with a single switch removed a step from the most common task.
- Settings that were changed once moved behind one entry.
- Reports became a filter on the main view.
- Empty states explained what would appear there, instead of showing zeros.
Then Make It Calm
Only after the structure was simpler did we work on the surface: one type size for data, one for labels, colour only for state. People spend hours a day in a product like this, so colour is kept for what changes.
I work in the same order on websites: the structure comes first, the look after it. Interface work like this is under UI/UX Design on the services page.