Cariad Finance Dashboard

Intranet experience also matters

For Cariad China
Oct 2023- Dec 2023
All data on the interface is fake data 😜
I made it up, don't want to be sued ⚖️
After joining Cariad, my first task was designing a finance BI dashboard for our local team. "I don't know what to read, it gives me a headache!", that's their comment. I thought that they have exaggerated a bit. But the minute I saw it, I felt sorry for them. There're colorful blocks floating on an ugly gradient background, messy fonts and a "I have no clue" structure... I was impressed that they could tolerate it for so long.
I was the only designer for this project, the work package was 1 whole dashboard with 2 skins: dark and light. No developers, because they planned to find a supplier after new year ( But I would be out of this project since I needed to back to the core business ). That's all the background.
"
Your employee deserve a better intranet.
"

Although my finance colleagues were like:"Hey, just make a new version as you want! No matter what, I believe that it's gonna be better than this one!". But I still chose to follow the regular design process than directly jumping into just visual modifications. First step first, identify problems through interviews and observations, then listed potential solutions:

My design approach is driven by informed assumptions and strategic insights, inspired by leading market products

The primary thing is making content readable, that's the most often heard complaint. I made a small visual system for them, with layout grids, colors, and fonts. For icons, we already have a set, so I just used that directly. Other details, I won't elaborate further here since it's more clear to just check it directly.

It has less than 20 pages, main purpose is showing finance report for a quick scan

It's a quick internal design task, I had other tasks while I was doing it. I guess that is also the case for most companies. Many of them have no full-time responsible designers for their intranet, or they just purchased a horrible ERP, so all their employees are suffering. The management level should notice that if you really want to boost efficiency, maybe improve your intranet rather than only eliminate positions. If all internal tools are fast enough, then there's no need to overhire.