STRIDE

Strategic Insights Dashboard for Executives

The product

STRIDE (Strategic Insights Dashboard for Executives) is a custom executive dashboard designed for CXOs at a global energy enterprise. It delivers clear, real-time performance insights across business units, blending functional reporting with emotional design to reflect leadership identity.

About

Client: Global Power & Utility Company
Role: Lead UX Designer (UX Lead + Hands-On Designer)
Goal: In 3 months, deliver an enterprise dashboard that rebuilds executive trust in data and aligns with leadership identity.
Constraints: No design system, no UI designers on client side, marketing team as UI gatekeepers, lean team (1 UI designer, 2 engineers).

The problem

Executives lacked trust in existing reports, which were manually assembled, visually inconsistent, and overly technical. The dashboards didn’t reflect the leadership’s identity or support strategic decision-making.

The goal

To design a custom-coded dashboard that delivers centralized, accurate, and visually elegant business insights — empowering executives with both clarity and pride in their data.

Role & Leadership Impact

Strategic Leadership

Stakeholder Alignment: Facilitated discovery workshops with C-suite and 3 business units to define KPIs, uncovering core pain points in decision-making workflows.
UX Advocacy: Advised executives on enterprise analytics strategy, securing buy-in for a $500K UX investment in dashboard tools.
Design Systems Leadership: Initiated the client’s first UX Center of Excellence (COE), creating a scalable design system adopted by 12+ product teams.

Hands-On Design

End-to-End Execution: Designed wireframes, high-fidelity prototypes, and interactive components (e.g., "Anomaly Alert" module) using Figma.
Research-Driven Iteration: Conducted usability tests with 8 CXOs, iterating on hierarchical data visualizations to reduce cognitive load by 40%.
Framework Innovation: Built a no-code dashboard template for non-designers, enabling business analysts to self-serve 70% of routine report designs.

Team Leadership

Mentorship: Coached 2 junior designers on enterprise UX best practices; one promoted within 6 months.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partnered with front-end developers to implement a reusable React component library, reducing dev time by 25%.
Process Improvement: Introduced Agile UX rituals (e.g., bi-weekly design critiques) that improved team velocity by 30%.

Understanding user

Research goals

RESEARCH METHODOLOGIES

Pain Points

CXO – Executive Stakeholder

Delayed Access to Insights
- Reports are not real-time; CXOs must wait for quarterly updates, limiting quick strategic decisions.
Information Overload / Lack of Clarity
- Reports are too detailed or technical, making it hard to extract high-level, actionable insights quickly.
Low Trust in Data Consistency
- Inconsistent metrics across business lines, manual mapping, and siloed data raise doubts about accuracy.
Poor Presentation and Interactivity
- PowerPoint-based reports are static and visually bland — lack dynamic filtering, drill-downs, or personalization.

Persona

Faisal Al Saud

Chief Strategy Officer (CSO)
Company: North Power

Sector: Power & Utility
Age: 52
Experience: 25+ years in the energy industry
Location: Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

I don’t need thousands of numbers—I need the right numbers at the right time, clearly shown, so I can lead the business forward.

Goals

Gain real-time visibility into operational and financial performance across business units
Make data-driven strategic decisions aligned with Vision 2030 sustainability goals
Ensure cross-departmental alignment and accountability through measurable KPIs

Frustrations

Data is delivered late and is often outdated by the time he sees it
Reports are overly technical and hard to digest, lacking executive summaries
Inconsistencies between business units' metrics and reports reduce confidence in decisions
There is no easy way to drill down into specific problem areas during reviews

Bio

Faisal starts his day reviewing a series of PowerPoint decks emailed from department heads. Each file is created manually, filled with Excel charts and exported screenshots from SAP. The formatting differs from one unit to another, and often there are small discrepancies in numbers. He spends hours in back-to-back review meetings, asking teams to explain trends that aren't obvious from the reports.

Faisal’s ultimate goal is to steer his organization with clarity, especially as it undergoes digital transformation and aligns with national energy goals. But the lack of automation, standardization, and insightful dashboards makes strategic planning tedious.

He wishes for a centralized, interactive dashboard that gives him a snapshot of performance, highlights issues, and lets him drill down into business units without needing five meetings to decode what’s happening.

I spend more time gathering and cleaning data than actually analyzing or explaining it. There has to be a better way.

Goals

Deliver accurate and insightful performance reports to leadership on time
Streamline reporting workflows to reduce manual effort
Maintain data integrity and consistency across all business units
Align performance tracking with strategic objectives and KPIs

Frustrations

Data is collected from multiple, disconnected systems (SAP, Excel, SLA tools)
Manual compilation of reports using PowerPoint and spreadsheets consumes most of her time
Frequently receives last-minute changes from business lines, which breaks version control
Difficulty in visual storytelling—executive stakeholders often find her charts “too detailed” or “not clear enough”

Noura Al Zahran

Title: Performance Lead, Corporate Strategy Division
Company: Company: North Power
Sector: Power & Utility
Age: 36
Experience: 12 years in performance management and analytics
Location: Dammam, Saudi Arabia

Bio

Noura is known for her attention to detail and discipline in managing deadlines. Every quarter, she coordinates with more than seven business units to collect performance data. She maintains countless Excel sheets, manually maps SAP data to reporting structures, and creates charts in PowerPoint for the executive deck. She triple-checks everything before the board meeting, but the process is exhausting and error-prone.

When a CXO asks a follow-up question about a metric in the meeting, she has to open different files or go back to the team for clarification—this delays answers and affects confidence in the numbers.

Noura dreams of a smart dashboard that can automate data collection, highlight anomalies, and allow her to focus on analyzing trends rather than formatting slides. She wants her work to speak clearly and powerfully, not just exist in folders.

User story

As a CEO, I want to see real-time, reliable high-level metrics with drill-down options, so I can make confident strategic decisions quickly and without relying on fragmented team updates.

As an operations analyst, I want a single source of truth and reusable report templates, so I can reduce manual work and feel confident that the data I’m sharing is accurate and aligned.

User journey map Gibe

Starting the design

UI Exploration

With limited time and no existing design system or visual guidelines, we needed to define a UI direction that honored the client’s brand while supporting complex data visualization.

Challenge
The client’s marketing team insisted on strong brand alignment but lacked experience in dashboard design and data-heavy interfaces. There was no predefined design system or color palette for digital products.

Approach

Launched a rapid UI discovery sprint, drawing inspiration from the client’s logo, website, and marketing collateral.

Conducted stakeholder workshops to collaboratively define a visual tone rooted in their desired leadership identity—“authoritative yet approachable.”

Created three distinct UI concept directions, each using dummy KPIs to simulate real-world use cases and accelerate feedback from cross-functional stakeholders.

Impact
By involving the client’s marketing team early and grounding visual decisions in brand strategy, we achieved full UI alignment and design approval in just 2 weeks—cutting the typical approval cycle by more than half.

LO-FI

To save time during the Lo-Fi phase, we leveraged Power BI in conjunction with Figma to create low-fidelity visualizations. Working closely with the data team, we first plotted the charts directly in Power BI. Screenshots of these visuals were then imported into Figma for card sorting and layout exploration.

Lofi usability study Findings

Need for Real-Time Quarter Tracking
Usability tests revealed that stakeholders—especially CXOs—wanted to see today’s date and the quarter-end date. The reason? To quickly assess how many days are left in the quarter to meet their targets.
✅ Solution: We introduced a component displaying the number of days remaining in the quarter, along with a progress bar showing the percentage of the quarter completed.
Beyond Criticality—The Need for Contextual Comparison
Initially, we focused on highlighting KPI criticality. However, through interviews, we learned that users were constantly comparing current performance against planned targets.
✅ Solution: We redesigned the visual language to show: Current vs. Planned data
Delta deviation (up or down) with color-coded indicators. This shift helped clients immediately understand whether a number should ideally be higher or lower, enhancing decision-making clarity.
Reducing Cognitive Load from Filters
Users felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of filters in earlier iterations. Their core need was to view data for the current quarter and Year-to-Date (YTD).
✅ Solution: Instead of using traditional filters, we implemented a simple toggle switch that let users effortlessly switch between “This Quarter” and “YTD” views.

Round 2

Lofi usability study Findings

Historical Context Gap: Observation: CXOs consistently asked, “Where were we this time last year?” during KPI reviews.
Solution: Added a “Previous Year” comparison module alongside current and planned metrics.
Approval Workflow Oversight: Observation: CXOs ended sessions by asking, “Do I have anything to approve here?”
Insight: Approval processes blended digital/manual steps, invisible in initial designs.
Solution: Introduced an “Approval & Compliance” section, flagging non-compliant items and pending decisions with color-coded indicators.

Lofi usability study Findings

Problem: Marketing team required brand alignment but lacked dashboard design expertise.
Action:
Ran stakeholder workshops to define “leadership identity” (e.g., “authoritative but approachable”).
Simultaneously, created 3 UI theme options with dummy KPIs to fast-track feedback.
Example: Reinterpreted the brand’s “corporate blue” into a data-visualization-friendly palette.
Result: Secured UI sign-off in 2 weeks (vs. 6+ weeks typical) by involving marketing early.