Loomly · Core product · 2021

Making a data-heavy console readable

Six years of features, one screen, no hierarchy

A console that had grown one feature request at a time. Every team's most important thing was on screen, which meant nothing was.

Finding out what people came for

We logged the first three actions of 200 sessions. Eighty percent of visits were one of four questions.

The screen supported around forty. That mismatch was the whole design brief.

Nothing was deleted — this is enterprise software and someone depends on every switch. We changed weight instead.

We didn't take features away. We took away the claim that they were all equally important.

Five teams had a stake in that screen. I ran the review as a usability test on their own workflows rather than a design presentation.

Watching their own analyst take four minutes to find a number ended the debate faster than any slide.

What changed

I under-invested in the migration. Power users had muscle memory we broke without warning, and we spent a month apologising for a two-week comms job.