Category Manager Dashboard
A calm, opinionated cockpit for category managers — surfacing the next best action across 12K SKUs.
Before a single pixel.
Discovery, framing, structure and validation — the work that decided what the screens had to be.
- 01Discover
Watch the ten-tab morning
Observed category managers opening their day — ten tabs, three exports, no single answer to 'what needs me today?'.
Observation sessionsTab/tool inventoryDiary study - 02Define
Triage, not transparency
Reframed the brief from 'show all the data' to 'shorten the list of what needs attention'.
Jobs-to-be-doneInformation priority matrixSuccess metrics - 03Structure
Glance vs focus
Split the surface into two registers so scanning and deep-diving never fight for the same pixels.
Card sortingIA blueprintDensity studies - 04Ideate
Sketch the signal set
Explored twelve above-the-fold signal layouts in wireframe before choosing chart types.
WireframesData-viz explorationsCo-design workshop - 05Validate
First-click and time-to-insight
Six rounds with real managers, measuring seconds-to-answer rather than opinions.
First-click testingTime-to-insight benchmarksEye-tracking pilot
Straight from the source.
Live captures of the shipped product and the design files behind it.
The brief.
12,000 SKUs across nine categories. Managers were drowning in tabs. We built a dashboard that prioritises what's broken first and quietly stays out of the way when things are fine.
The previous tool treated every metric equally — a wall of charts that took thirty minutes to read. Managers needed a surface that triaged itself: what changed today, what's at risk this week, what's safe to ignore.
Talking to real users.
- ✦Card sorting
- ✦First-click testing
- ✦Task-based interviews
- ✦Eye-tracking pilot
9 category managers · 4 buyers · 2 supply-chain leads
5 weeks discovery + biweekly co-design
"I open ten tabs before I've had coffee. I want one."
"I don't know which metric matters — I stare at all of them."
How the study actually ran — four frames from field to evidence.
Morning triage
Watched category managers open six tabs before deciding which enquiry to touch first.
Clustering the noise
Synthesis wall turned scattered observations into three repeatable triage themes.
Queue over dashboard
Sketched a prioritised worklist instead of charts nobody acted on.
Time-to-first-action
Benchmarked how fast a manager could act after login, round after round.
- Insight 01
Triage over transparency
Managers didn't want more data — they wanted a shorter list of what needs attention.
- Insight 02
Glance density matters
Above-the-fold had to encode 12 signals without feeling like a cockpit.
- Insight 03
Deltas beat absolutes
'Change since yesterday' was the most-scanned value in every test.
How it came together.
- 01
Wrote an information-priority matrix with the head of category before any pixels.
- 02
Designed in two registers — 'glance' (status, deltas) and 'focus' (the one chart you came for).
- 03
Built a custom data-viz kit on top of an existing tokens layer, no third-party charts.
- 04
Iterated on density with real managers, not stakeholders — six rounds before launch.