How Redesigning a Single Dashboard Led to a Company-Wide 60% Gain in Efficiency
Overview
SatSure provides powerful geospatial analytics to enterprise clients like ITC and HDFC Bank. The clients' corporate teams use these complex dashboards for high-stakes, daily decisions, from approving agricultural loans to managing raw material supply chains.
I led the redesign of ITC’s "Micro-Market Planning" dashboard. It is a specialized geospatial tool that procurement managers use to analyze 'micro-markets' of individual farm plots and plan their harvest procurement strategy. Their team was struggling with a confusing, high-friction interface, leading to costly delays and frustration.
This project began as a single-client fix but quickly revealed a much larger opportunity. The solution I designed for ITC became the blueprint for "Presentation Layer," a company-wide design system that ultimately consolidated 9 unique dashboards, saved 60% in development time, and became the new standard for all 15+ of the enterprise clients.
Role: Product Designer
Responsibility: UX Research (Audit, Stakeholder Interviews, Hotjar Analysis), Information Architecture, Prototyping, Usability Testing, Visual Design, Design System Strategy
Duration: 4 Months
Team: 2 Designers, 1 AVP, 2 PMs, 10+ Developers & Data Scientists
Tools Used: Figma, FigJam, Jira, Confluence, Hotjar, Google Workspace, Tableau
What is the Product?
A Micro-Market Planning dashboard, which is a specialized geospatial tool built to support ITC's raw material supply chain. It is used to identify areas with the most eucalyptus, subabul, and casuarina species and determine their procurement strategy.
Who is the User?
The primary users were corporate stakeholders and procurement managers at ITC. This persona is a high-stakes, data-heavy user. They are not casually browsing; they are on a mission-critical, daily task: identifying and qualifying specific farms for tree procurement. Their decisions directly impact the company's raw material supply chain.
The High-Stakes Procurement Task
Before diving into the design, it's crucial to understand the user's workflow:
Analyze Data
An ITC manager queries the dashboard to find farms that meet hyper-specific criteria, e.g., crop species, crop age, farm area size.
Make a Decision
They must quickly identify a viable group of farms from the map.
Take Action
They then select these farms and export the data as KMLs & CSVs to dispatch field officers, who physically visit the farms to procure the harvest.
Any friction in this process leads to delays and potential for costly errors.
The Problem: "I'm Lost on a Map"
Through stakeholder interviews, a heuristic audit, and analyzing Hotjar recordings, I diagnosed the core problem. The existing dashboard made the procurement task frustrating.
A direct quote from an ITC stakeholder summed it up:
“I’m not able to understand where the takeaway is after I query. I have to search for it.”
By synthesizing user feedback, I identified three core pain points:
The Disorienting Map
The primary issue was a failure of context. When a user queried a specific district, the map would fail to zoom to that selection. Instead, it would zoom out to the entire map of India, leaving the user completely disoriented and forced to manually find and zoom into their region of interest.
This disorientation was compounded by a confusing landing screen:
The "Filters" panel was closed by default, hiding the user's starting point.
The panel was hidden behind a tiny, 16px chevron icon that had poor discoverability.
The chevron icon doesn’t change it’s state when the filter panel is opened.
The data product & time period input fields are preselected & disabled. Users were frustrated when they were not able to make see change when they clicked.
Inconsistent labelling throughout the product.
When a user queried a specific district, the map would fail to zoom to the specified district in India. Instead, it would zoom to the entire map of India, leaving the user completely disoriented and forced to manually find and zoom into their region of interest.
A Maze of Wasted Clicks
Because the controls were hidden, illogical, and disconnected, the user was forced into a high-friction workflow. Simply seeing data after a query required three unnecessary actions:
The "Layers" panel had a long, inefficient scroll, and the "Harvest Progression" slider was in a different location, completely disconnected from the data it was supposed to control.
The metadata showed just specie name, area and specie age when clicked on a plot. Also, the selected state was not visually highlighting.
This high-friction sequence wasted time and dramatically increased the cognitive load for every single search, turning a simple task into a frustrating chore.
Disconnected Data & Missing Context
Even after the user found the data, the UI actively fought their ability to analyze it.
The chart panel and harvest progression slider occupied more than half the screen, completely blocking the map. This broke the user's core need: comparing data with its geospatial context. Users were forced to manually toggle the panel on and off just to see the map, breaking their flow.
The table too doesn’t allow the user to interact with map and view the table’s data in through the map.
My Approach & Design Goals
Based on this research, I defined three clear goals for the redesign. The solution had to be:
Automated & Contextual: It must be intuitive, auto-zooming to the user's selection and auto-showing the relevant data to dramatically reduce clicks.
Clear & Cohesive: It must provide clear takeaways. All related controls must be co-located in logical panels, and data must be available on-demand, via a tooltip.
Scalable & Systematic: The solution must be built not as a one-off fix, but as a set of reusable components that could solve this problem for all 15+ of our clients.
To validate my direction, I analyzed best-in-class geospatial tools like Global Forest Watch and Felt Maps, which helped inform my prototypes for a more intuitive, industry-standard layer panel.
The Solution: A Clear Path to Procurement
I designed and prototyped a new, map-first experience, going through 4 iterations in Figma and 1 iteration each in QGIS and Tableau to analyse data layers based on user and stakeholder feedback. The final solution directly addressed each of the core pain points.
Iteration 1
Iteration 2
Iteration 3
Iteration 4
QGIS Iteration
Tableau Iteration
The Smart Map & Automated Panels
This is the landing screen, already zoomed to user’s assigned region, with filter panel opened. No more forcing the user to hunt. No preselected & disabled input fields, as the user can’t change them. Used an accordion for bigger clickable area, with the correct chevron state. Added a “Block” & “Time Period” input field for granular regional & timeline analysis.
Before
After
After the query:
The map auto-zooms to the selected region with heatmap.
The filter panel auto-closes.
The layer panel auto-opens, instantly showing the data. This "zero-click" workflow change transformed the experience and became the most-praised feature by the client.
Before
After
The Unified Control Panel
I redesigned the disjointed UI into a logical, co-located Layer Panel. This new panel now includes all filters, like the harvest progression slider, putting all data controls in one intuitive place. To solve the "missing context" problem, I added an on-hover tooltip so an ITC manager can simply mouse over any plot on the map to see all its critical metadata.
Before
After
I replaced the confusing bottom panel with an intuitive Side Panel that clearly displays charts and tables as actionable "takeaways."
Before
After
The Pivot: From a Client Fix to a Company-Wide System
This is where the project's scope changed dramatically.
As we were finalizing the ITC redesign, our team had an "aha" moment. The problems ITC faced were not unique; they were the same problems all 15 of our clients had. Our developers were complaining about rebuilding the same broken components for every new project, costing 4+ months of dev time for 80% similar work.
The successful ITC redesign was our template. I led the initiative to abstract the new, successful components, the smart layer panel, the side-panel, the map controls, into a robust, reusable design system, "Presentation Layer." This system became the single source of truth for all 9 of our dashboard products.
The Final Outcome & Impact
The results of this two-phase project were immediate and measurable, creating a win for our client and a massive win for our business.
For the Client (ITC)
Qualitative feedback shifted from "I'm lost" to "This is great, it works well."
30%
Faster Task Completion
For Procurement Managers
1-Point
For the Business (SatSure)
Qualitative feedback shifted from "I'm lost" to "This is great, it works well."
60%
Reduction in Design & Development Time
For New Client Dashboards
80%
Eliminated Inconsistent UX Issues
Reduced User Errors by ~20%
9
Unique Dashboards Consolidated
Into One Cohesive System
Reflections & Key Learnings
Solve one problem, then scale. My biggest takeaway is that the best design systems aren't built in a vacuum. They are born from solving a single, real, high-stakes user problem first. The success of the ITC project gave us the blueprint and the business case to scale.
Scalability is about fewer, smarter components. This project taught me that a scalable system isn't about having more components, it's about having fewer, smarter ones that are flexible and well-defined.
What I'd do differently: If I could do it again, I would have pushed to include a dark theme in the initial design system build. It's a key accessibility feature for users analyzing complex data maps all day, and adding it later is always more difficult.
