Elevating Enterprise Reporting

At a Fortune 100 insurer, the teams behind an enterprise retirement platform relied on reporting to make daily decisions, but the reporting experience had grown inconsistent across teams. I joined as the business lead and UX partner on a cross-functional effort to rethink how reporting data was structured, surfaced, and understood.

Six teams had a stake in the outcome, spanning business leadership, Product, UX, Engineering, business partners, and the end users who lived in these reports daily. None of them reported to me. I owned the UX strategy and the alignment work, and partnered with the design team on execution, which meant most of the job was getting groups with different incentives to commit to the same definition of success.

The biggest early lesson was that great UX outcomes happen when business and design work side by side from the start, not when design is handed a finished set of requirements.

Two problems, one root cause

The reporting experience was failing the business and its users in parallel, and both traced back to the same missing thing: a shared understanding of what good reporting looked like.

Business problem

• Reporting processes varied across teams
• Decision-making was slow and inconsistent
• No shared framework for evaluating data quality

User problem

• Hard to find clear, actionable reporting data
• Navigation slowed daily workflows
• Users created workarounds outside the system

Alignment had to come before redesign

Before touching the interface, I focused discovery on how different teams actually thought about reporting.

• Met with business stakeholders to understand reporting goals and decision points
• Conducted user interviews to uncover workflow challenges and workaround behaviors
• Mapped the current-state reporting journey to identify friction and misalignment

The clearest finding: teams held different mental models of what reporting was for. Until those mental models converged, any redesign would just be a nicer surface over the same confusion. Alignment had to come first.

A standoff between the people who used the reports and the people who funded them

The sharpest disagreement on the project was over filtering. Business users wanted substantially more control over how they could filter and segment report data. Upper management was focused on what that functionality would cost to build.

Both positions were defensible, which is what made it hard. The users were describing real friction in work they did every day. Management was accountable for spend on a platform with a long list of competing priorities. Framed as a yes-or-no budget question, it was going to be settled by whoever held more authority in the room, and I did not hold that authority. Neither outcome would have been decided on merit.

So I stopped treating it as a budget question and started treating it as an empirical one: does richer filtering actually change how quickly and how confidently people reach an answer? That question has a testable answer, and nobody in the room could claim to already know it.

I designed prototypes quickly, at low fidelity, and put them in front of real business users. The sessions were the argument. Watching users navigate reporting without the filtering they had asked for made the cost of not building it legible, and it connected directly to something discovery had already surfaced: the workarounds people had built outside the system to get answers the reports would not give them. Those workarounds were already being paid for, in time, spread invisibly across teams.

The functionality shipped. What made that possible was not persuasion, and it was certainly not authority. It was moving the disagreement onto ground where evidence could settle it. That is the tool I reach for whenever a decision is deadlocked between people who each have a legitimate claim to be right.

Three bets that shaped the reporting experience

• Hierarchy first. A clear visual hierarchy surfaces the most important insights first, instead of treating every metric as equally urgent.
• Simplified navigation. Navigation was reduced to cut the cognitive load of moving between reports.
• Standardized patterns. Reporting interactions were standardized so the same action behaved the same way everywhere.

From complexity to clarity

The redesign restructured reporting around understanding rather than navigation. The same underlying data, reorganized so the answer came first and the detail followed (see the before and after at the top of this page).

• Reduced cognitive load and decision time
• Improved consistency across reporting workflows
• Enabled clearer insight discovery and drill-down

A clear path through the data

The interaction model was built around a single, predictable flow so users always knew where to start and where to go next:

1. Overview 01

   Summary

   Start with a high-level view to orient understanding.

3. Focus 02

   Metric

   Drill into the specific metric or segment that matters.

5. Refine 03

   Filters

   Adjust filters or dimensions to refine insights.

7. Detail 04

   Tables

   Open detailed tables only when needed, not by default.

The redesigned reporting experience changed how teams engaged with their data. Users could locate key information more quickly and confidently, and the day-to-day conversation shifted from "where is the data?" to "what does the data mean?"

Reporting workflows became more consistent across teams, which is what ultimately made merging multiple reporting systems a realistic next step rather than an aspiration. Post-launch feedback from both business stakeholders and end users was strongly positive.

What I learned

• Alignment is critical. Teams need a shared definition of success before design can move forward.
• Evidence outranks authority. When two groups both have a legitimate claim to be right, the fastest path is not a better argument. It is moving the decision onto ground where a prototype can answer it.
• Clarity matters. Surfacing the right information is more valuable than showing everything.
• Collaboration drives outcomes. Working closely with stakeholders and users accelerated progress.

If the project continued, the next step would be broadening testing across additional reporting workflows to ensure consistency at scale.