Enterprise tool · 2024—2025
An internal tool 200+ people actually want to open
End-to-end design of Whatfix's quality-control and activity-tracking dashboard — plus the full component library that keeps every new screen consistent.
Role
Product Designer — end-to-end, incl. design system
Timeline
2024–2025 · ongoing
Team
1 designer · internal engineering · ops stakeholders
Platform
Internal web app
200+
Daily employees on the tool
1
Component library powering every screen
Live
In production at Whatfix
01 · Overview
Whatfix's delivery assurance team tracks quality-control checks and team activity across hundreds of engagements. Before DAC, that meant spreadsheets: manual roll-ups, stale numbers, and managers spending review meetings reconstructing reality instead of acting on it.
I designed the dashboard end to end — information architecture, every workflow, the visual system — and built the component library alongside it so the tool could grow without me becoming its bottleneck.
02 · The Problem
What we were trying to solve
Quality data existed but couldn't be acted on: scattered across sheets, aggregated by hand, and outdated by the time it reached a review meeting. Internal tools were also built screen-by-screen with no shared system — every addition drifted further from the last.
Pain point 01
Insight arrived too late
Manual roll-ups meant QC trends surfaced weeks after the fact — managers audited history instead of steering work.
Pain point 02
Every team saw a different truth
Parallel spreadsheets produced conflicting numbers, and meetings burned time reconciling them instead of deciding.
Pain point 03
No system underneath
Internal tools accreted inconsistent patterns — each new screen was designed from scratch and looked like it.
03 · Research
What the users taught us
I shadowed QC reviewers and team managers through their weekly routines, mapped the data lifecycle from check to report, and inventoried the inconsistencies across existing internal screens.
Three altitudes, one tool
Reviewers work item-by-item, leads scan team health, managers need trends — the IA had to serve all three without three separate products.
Data entry is the adoption gate
If logging a check took longer than the spreadsheet, nothing else mattered — capture had to be faster than the status quo.
Consistency is a speed feature
Familiar patterns across screens meant zero retraining per release — the design system wasn't polish, it was adoption insurance.
04 · Design Process
From tangled problem to shipped solution
Stage 1 — Problem Identified
The spreadsheet was the symptom
Shadowing showed the real cost wasn't the sheets themselves but the latency they created — decisions made on stale data, meetings spent reconciling numbers. The problem was framed as time-to-insight, not tooling.
Stage 2 — Problem Scoping
Dashboard and design system, scoped together
I deliberately scoped the component library into v1 rather than 'after launch' — every screen designed once, componentised immediately, so consistency was structural instead of aspirational.
- Three user altitudes prioritised: reviewer, lead, manager
- Token and component foundations agreed with engineering upfront
Stage 3 — Solution Shaping
From data model to screens
IA and wireframes were built around the QC data lifecycle: fast capture for reviewers, live team views for leads, trend dashboards for managers. Components — tables, filters, status chips, metric cards — were designed as variants from day one.
Stage 4 — Impact Testing
Piloted inside the real routine
A pilot group ran their actual weekly QC cycle on the tool. Capture flows were trimmed until logging beat the spreadsheet on time; dashboard views were reworked around the questions managers actually asked in reviews.
- Capture speed benchmarked against the spreadsheet
- Dashboard views iterated on live review meetings
Stage 5 — Solution Deployed
Production, and a system that keeps shipping
DAC went live for 200+ daily users, and the component library became the shared language between design and engineering — new features now ship consistent by default.
05 · The Solution
The decisions that shaped it
DAC gives every altitude its view of the same live truth — reviewers capture fast, leads see team health at a glance, managers watch trends move — all built from one component library.
Decision 01
Capture faster than the spreadsheet
Logging a QC check is a focused, keyboard-friendly flow with smart defaults — beating the old workflow on speed is what made 200+ people switch and stay.
Decision 02
Role-based views on live data
Item queues for reviewers, team-health boards for leads, trend dashboards for managers — the same data at three altitudes, so review meetings act on numbers instead of reconciling them.
Decision 03
A full component library
Tokens, tables, filters, chips, metric cards and empty states as documented Figma variants mapped to build — every new screen assembles from parts instead of starting over.
Decision 04
Status you can read across a room
A strict colour and chip system for QC states means a wall of items scans in seconds — the visual language does the triage.
06 · Impact
What changed
DAC is live in production at Whatfix — one of the projects behind a Spot Award given to 10 people out of 900+.
200+
Employees using it daily
Live
In production, actively extended
1 of 10
Spot Award from 900+ employees
- Replaced the spreadsheet workflow: QC data is captured at the source and readable live, ending manual roll-ups.
- Review meetings shifted from reconciling numbers to acting on them.
- The component library keeps every new feature consistent without per-screen design involvement.
- Recognised with a Whatfix Spot Award — 1 of 10 across 900+ employees.
07 · Learnings
What I'm taking with me
- 01
Internal users are the harshest adoption test — with no marketing to lean on, the tool wins only by beating the old workflow on speed.
- 02
Shipping the design system with v1, not after it, is what kept a fast-growing tool coherent.
- 03
Dashboards succeed when they're designed around the questions people ask in meetings, not the data that happens to exist.