Case StudySwimlane Turbine
SaaS platform modernization.
The platform suffered from fragmented user experiences, inconsistent UI, and growing technical debt due to rapid feature expansion — compromising usability and scalability amidst new market competitors.
Solution & Vision
A cross-functional effort to establish a "north star" UX vision.
I led a cross-functional effort to establish a "north star" UX Vision, aligning Product, Design, and Engineering around a scalable design system while strategically integrating AI-powered experiences to future-proof the platform. Key focus areas included accelerating time-to-value, enhancing usability, and achieving platform-wide consistency.
Key Contributions
- Design System Leadership: spearheaded a design system audit (95% coverage) and rollout strategy, establishing a hub-and-spoke model that cut average time-to-decision by 18% across the product development lifecycle.
- Strategic Prioritization: introduced a prioritization framework that balanced short-term wins with long-term modernization, guiding initiatives like AI Integration, Notifications, RBAC, and Navigation.
- Impactful Redesigns: led end-to-end design for major feature areas, including a comprehensive dashboard redesign that enabled 35% faster dashboard creation and decreased edit/configuration errors by 20% in user testing.
- AI/ML Integration: deeply involved in designing core AI data flows and agents, including action policies and data models to enable scalable AI/ML automation.
Measurable Outcomes
- Strategic Influence: successfully positioned the investment in design as a direct business driver, increasing design's voice in strategic company conversations.
- Operational Efficiency: 18% reduction in average time-to-decision for product development.
- User Productivity: 35% faster dashboard creation, 20% decrease in configuration errors.
- Customer Support Reduction: support tickets related to dashboards dropped by 19%.
Background
Swimlane Turbine is a Security Automation platform that enables enterprise Security teams to establish, automate, and scale their security programs. The platform attracts customers with its flexibility to integrate with various tools, but this flexibility introduced growing complexity. Its core audience was Security Analysts, with many users contributing from DevOps teams who relied on the platform's low-code scripting and API integrations to customize automation workflows. I led design of interfaces supporting use cases like writing and debugging Python-based automation scripts, managing JSON configuration files, and viewing system logs and debugging outputs.
Problem
As the platform rapidly added features, the design foundation wasn't maintained. This pattern resulted in fragmented user experiences and inconsistent UI patterns across the product, creating increased cognitive load for users and growing technical debt. The product's usability and scalability were being compromised, and new competitors were entering the market with more modern, consistent user experiences.
Solution
My role was to lead a comprehensive UX modernization effort that aligned product, design, and engineering around a scalable design system while introducing AI-powered experiences to future-proof the platform. I developed and presented a "north star" UX Vision to leadership, focusing on:
- Faster time-to-value for security workflows
- Improved usability and onboarding
- Platform-wide design consistency
- Positioning for AI-driven automation
Another example, of the Application Builder:
Process — Design System Rollout
I led a cross-functional design system audit and rollout strategy by conducting a comprehensive component audit alongside Engineering and Product teams, uncovering 95% coverage across the application. To streamline modernization, I established a hub-and-spoke model where front-end engineers collaborated directly with my design team on component updates, complemented by weekly QA reviews led by principal UI developers to ensure consistency. This effort improved velocity, consistency, and handoff quality — and led to higher confidence in my team to execute and think about larger workflows rather than individual features.
Learnings
One of the hardest parts of earning alignment for the design system upgrade was getting stakeholders to let go of the perception that updating components would take more time and decrease feature velocity. I addressed this in two ways. First, I initiated regular cross-functional workshops, creating a bridge between my design team and the front-end developers — sessions designed to foster empathy and a shared understanding of our respective crafts, which changed how we approached sprint estimations and fostered collective ownership of our design debt.
Second, I focused my efforts on strategic, high-leverage initiatives. Instead of pushing for a full, immediate overhaul, I worked closely with key product managers to identify and leverage them as UX champions, prioritizing the most visible and high-value features for the initial design system integration. This let us demonstrate the tangible benefits of a consistent UX in a critical, visible area — proving the design system could accelerate development and elevate quality, which created organizational confidence and paved the way for broader adoption.
Process — Systems Thinking
Due to the siloed nature of the Product Management organization, I noticed significant overlap in proposed features and vague direction in various product requirement documents (PRDs). To address this, I introduced a prioritization framework that evaluated all design opportunities based on business impact and technical feasibility. Done in close partnership with Product Management leadership, this let us create a unified, phased strategy that balanced high-value, short-term wins with long-term modernization goals, ensuring all PMs and designers were aligned on a shared mission. These initiatives tied back into the North Star vision, including:
- AI Integration: designed user-friendly workflows for AI-driven processes (see the Hero AI case study)
- Notifications: built a centralized, flexible system to support alerts, tasks, and escalation
- Primary Navigation: restructured navigation for scalability and clarity; introduced IA improvements
- RBAC: streamlined complex role/permissions UX for both Admins and end-users
- MSSP Support: designed multi-tenant experiences supporting separation and oversight
Each initiative involved a full design process, including research, stakeholder interviews, information architecture, component system updates or creation, prototyping, and user testing — large, complex efforts, each taking 3+ months to define, architect, design, and deliver. The result was a noticeable increase in product delivery speed and improved engineering execution, ultimately accelerating value to customers.
Example: Dashboard Redesign
The dashboard redesign is an example of the design process each initiative went through.
Research
I led a comprehensive user research initiative targeting our enterprise users — 10 user interviews, then validation tests later in the process — to identify critical pain points, validate design assumptions, and quantify the impact of improvements. This was important because the company did not have a history of quantifying product decisions, and I prefer to measure what matters to shape future conversations. Key insights included:
- 60% of users cited editing existing dashboards as unnecessarily complex, often requiring multiple steps and workarounds.
- 70% of users reported frustration with the dependency on report creation before building dashboards.
- 60% of users struggled to identify the correct chart type due to unclear labeling and limited data previews.
Discovery
I led a cross-functional workshop to map the dashboard creation flow, which was critical in identifying the redundant "report creation" step. The four-step process looked like this: selecting record data, generating reports, building charts, and applying charts to dashboards. Through this detailed breakdown, we uncovered several friction points that created unnecessary complexity for users, and were able to propose a more intuitive, streamlined experience that reduced cognitive load and let users build dashboards more efficiently.
Define Principles
After identifying key challenges, I worked with my team to design principles that directly addressed user pain points, then aligned cross-functional stakeholders:
- Consistency to build user trust through standardized layouts, icons, and interactions
- Clarity & simplicity to reduce cognitive load with a clean, focused UI and clear hierarchy
- Accessibility to ensure full compliance with WCAG standards, critical for government users
- Actionable insights to shift from static data to meaningful trends, context, and recommendations that support decision-making
- Prioritized data to surface high-value metrics upfront with progressive disclosure, real-time updates and alerts
- Customizability to empower users to tailor views, filters, and layouts, with seamless navigation between summary and detail
These principles became the foundation for the redesign, ensuring alignment across product, design, and engineering while directly improving usability and business outcomes.
Redesign User Flow
I worked with architects to understand if there was a way to refactor the data model and create cards in a simpler way. After two working sessions, we aligned on a three-step flow that greatly simplified the process:
In this new process, we dropped a step in the user flow by creating a "hidden report" in the back end after the user added their record data to the dashboard card.
Update Visual Language
I assigned my visual designer to introduce a modern visual language that prioritized clarity, hierarchy, and usability — reducing cognitive load while supporting fast, high-confidence decision-making and conveying a more modern impression to prospects. Key elements included adding more columns to the layout for better white space and scalability. The color palette was updated to lean into the brand's tones, designed to support light and dark versions with three modes each: daily use, high contrast, and demo. Together, the design team created categorical, divergent, and spectral palettes along with 11 revised color scales to support all visualizations in the system, using Supa Palette to generate and compare numerous options and ensure at least AA WCAG compliance for every color.
In the end, we created visual and functional consistency across all data views that helped build familiarity and reduce learning time for users.
End Result
The redesigned flow drove measurable improvements:
- Eliminated redundant report creation, enabling 35% faster dashboard creation
- Elevated and enhanced other key data visualization features like search, filters, sort, and bulk actions
- Clarified chart types, data inputs, and permissions, resulting in a 60% decrease in edit and configuration errors during user testing
- Revamped the data visualization components (bar, line, graph charts, etc.) and UI style of all charts in the design system
Post-launch findings
By grounding the redesign in real user data, we not only improved the user experience but delivered measurable business value through increased adoption and reduced support burden — support tickets related to dashboards dropped by 19%. This design work was a strong signal to leadership that the investment in design was paying dividends, giving design a stronger voice in strategic conversations across the company.