Balancing data and design: a workflow for dashboards

This project started with extensive research for a large insurance company with very complex data visualisation requirements, but it resulted in much more.

Designing many dashboards for different industries, like fintech, insurance, tech and transport, I noticed a pattern in the most common struggles in data visualisation. Designers want to create visually appealing, user-friendly dashboards. Business stakeholders, like business analysts, product managers and product owners, want to show as much data as possible. The key is to find the balance between the two.

To help both sides, I created a data visualisation workflow board for collaboration between the design and product teams, and a Dashboard UI kit with the most common components and templates.

01 · Prepare A collaborative data visualisation board in Miro.

02 · Test the idea A workshop with the product team and analysis of the feedback.

03 · Build the UI kit Dashboard components and templates in Figma.

04 · Brainstorm The first project using the new workflow.

05 · Design & test Dashboard design and a shared prototype for testing.

06 · Evaluate Checking the design against the requirements and adding improvements.

The data visualisation workflow board in Miro, from the dashboard's purpose and audience to chart choice and iterative design.

Data visualisation can be confusing, especially when there is complex business logic behind it. Without a shared way of working, design and business teams pull in different directions: one toward a clean, readable interface, the other toward showing all available data.

A structured workflow for designing dashboards can help not only the design team, but the business teams as well.

I organised a workshop with our product owners and business analyst to test the workflow in practice. We used the board to brainstorm the first dashboard ideas and collected feedback on the process itself.

Wireframes are widely used to visualise ideas, but for data visualisation they can be confusing. Our product team told us that wireframes looked too plain, and it was hard to imagine what the dashboard would look like.

They started thinking about colours, fonts and other visual details, which shifted the focus away from the data and business logic. This is completely understandable.

So I looked for a more visual tool to work with, and designed a Dashboard UI kit with the most common components and templates for creating dashboards. This way we could discuss real charts and layouts from the start.

Templates from the Dashboard UI kit, built from the most common dashboard components.

With the UI kit and the workflow in place, we designed the dashboards, shared prototypes for testing and evaluated them against the business requirements.

Final designs: an insurance analytics dashboard, and the Insights Report with flow and funnel analysis.

We booked presentation slots in sprint review meetings to share our new workflow and the results of our user-centered dashboards with the wider team.

One of my biggest learnings from this project was that the usual tools don't always fit the problem. Wireframes are the default way to test an idea early, but for data visualisation they backfired — our product team started reacting to colours and fonts instead of the data and business logic behind the dashboard. Building a Dashboard UI kit with real chart types let us test the actual idea instead of a rough sketch of it.

This reinforced that a shared workflow between design and business teams needs a shared vocabulary, not just a shared process. Once we could all point at the same chart types and components, conversations moved from taste to substance — what data mattered, and how to show it clearly.

The collaborative approach behind it brought value beyond this one project, to how the design and product teams communicate day to day.