OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY: MSR REDESIGN
Company: Microsoft
Project: Eliminating 3-Week Reporting Bottleneck & Enhancing Executive Clarity
Role: Senior UX Designe (Product Design Lead)
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The Problem: Massive Time Sink and Executive Confusion
Exchange engineers were required to provide monthly service reports (MSR) on platform performance globally. This process was extremely time-consuming and difficult: it often took engineers 3+ weeks just to gather the necessary data, causing extreme anxiety and often resulting in cluttered, messy visualizations that lacked strategic insight. This reporting bottleneck severely hindered the ability of the VP of Exchange to make timely, informed decisions.
The How: Designing a Dual-Audience Strategic Reporting Tool
As the Product Design Lead, I owned the redesign of the MSR tool, which needed to serve two distinct audiences: the Engineers (creators) and the VP of Exchange (consumers).
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Strategic Solution: I designed a dynamic reporting template centered around a consistent top-level "scorecard" that would remain constant across all reports. Below this, I introduced customizable tiles and pages that allowed teams to surface critical data and point out problems/solutions easily. The design goals were clear: provide a service scorecard, explain why the scorecard looked that way, and surface "deep dive" information without requiring users to dive into dense slides.
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Leadership & Research: I led comprehensive user research (interviews, validation testing) to understand the high-anxiety pain points. I worked across multiple engineering teams to cultivate a productive partnership and drove design presentations to upper management to gain buy-in for this new, standardized reporting architecture.
The Result: Drastic Time Reduction and Enhanced Decision-Making
This project was a massive success across the board. The new design provided engineers with a consistent, effective template that drastically reduced their creation time from 3+ weeks to a matter of days. The VP of Exchange could now consume these reports with a much richer, deeper understanding of the platform's health. The design allowed for instant big-picture assessment, providing clarity even before diving into the content, ultimately accelerating executive communication and improving operational oversight.
