02 / 2024
Product design · Analytics
Pulse
Realtime analytics re-imagined for operators who live in the dashboard.
- Role
- Senior product designer
- Timeline
- 6 months, 2024
- Platform
- Web
- Team
- 2 designers, 8 engineers
24.8k
+312%
99.9
The brief
Operators watch Pulse for eight-hour shifts. Every pixel had to earn its place on a screen that never sleeps.
The challenge
The legacy dashboard treated every metric as equally urgent: forty tiles, all blinking. Operators compensated with sticky notes on bezels marking the four numbers that actually mattered.
We needed a hierarchy honest enough that a glance from across the room answered the only real question: is anything wrong, and how wrong?
The approach
- 01
Density studies
We prototyped five information densities and tested them with live production data, not lorem ipsum. The winning layout shows 60% fewer numbers at rest and surfaces detail on focus.
- 02
Alert hierarchy
A strict three-level signal scale: ambient, attention, action. Color is reserved for the top level only, so red means stand up, every time.
- 03
Motion as signal
Charts settle instantly; only state changes animate. When something moves on Pulse, it is information, never decoration.
The outcome
- 38%
- faster incident triage
- 5k/s
- events rendered live
- 60%
- less at-rest noise
Triage time dropped by a third in the first month. The sticky notes came off the bezels, which remains the metric I am proudest of.
I can read the room from the doorway now. That was never true with the old board.
