Structure: two modes and a separate configuration layer

The tempting move was to put everything into one large dashboard. But early discovery work surfaced two fundamentally different questions executives were asking

— What's happening? — exploration: spot anomalies, see segments where things shifted, and drill in.
— Are we on track? — status check: verify performance against goals without carrying extra context.

One interface served both poorly. We split them into two tabs — Performance Overview and KPI Tracker — each with its own drill logic and its own alerts.

The second part of the structural decision was moving configuration into a separate layer. When an executive opens the workspace in the morning, they're reading, not configuring. When they sit down once a quarter to reconfigure, that's exactly what they're doing. Mixing the two modes in one interface would have made both worse.

That's how Settings came to be: a dedicated space for defining scope, choosing metrics and segments, configuring alerts, connecting a Media Plan, and creating multiple views for different business contexts. That separation is what turned a dashboard into a workspace.

Performance Overview: drilling in without losing context

The risk on this screen was showing too much and overwhelming the user. The standard move — sending people to a separate page or modal on click — didn't work here: the executive loses the top-level picture and spends attention on reorientation.

We built an expandable widget with multiple levels of drill-down inside a single component. The top chart is the entry point; each next level unfolds from the one above it. Segments and metrics are switched directly inside the widget.

The result is that the executive can explore details without losing sight of the bigger picture.

KPI Tracker: different scenario, different pattern

One option was to reuse the same interaction logic as in Performance Overview. But the scenario here is different: the user doesn't need segments side by side — they need to quickly check status and, if something is off, drill into the cause.

A breadcrumb-based drill-down pattern fit that scenario. The top-level context doesn't need to stay in view — the focus belongs on the current level. Data and goals came from a connected planning source, which also informed the alerts.

Visual foundation

Executive workspace is the home surface for executive users. It had to be not only dense with information, but also feel like a polished and intentional entry point into the product.

With limited design resources, we approached this creatively by generating a landscape image that represented a holistic view and layering two animated cloud layers above it to add subtle motion and depth. The cloud concept also helped keep the experience visually consistent with another homepage experience in the product, which used a similar atmospheric visual language.

The clouds moved slowly from left to right and paused on hover to avoid distraction. The concept was also scalable, allowing the visual layer to evolve over time without affecting the layout.

Spotlights: a new priority arriving into a settled hierarchy

Spotlights were originally introduced as a separate experience before being brought into the workspace. When Spotlights became the highest-priority signal in the workspace, a familiar design problem appeared: where do you insert a new top layer without breaking an already-established hierarchy of tabs?

We placed Spotlights above the tabs as a dedicated card zone. Because they were updated periodically, keeping them permanently on-screen would have been wasteful — so I added a collapse pattern that reveals a floating button the user can return to when needed.

The component also appeared as banners of varying sizes. To make them feel consistent across sizes and placements, I built the visual language around a glass material that worked against any background.

Settings: the control layer

Settings is where the workspace is actually shaped. Separating it from the main view let the reading surface stay focused on performance, while all of the configuration — scope, segments, metrics, alerts, and the connected planning source behind KPI Tracker — lived behind a single dedicated layer.

This is also where the flexibility side of the original tension gets resolved. Users could create multiple views tailored to different business contexts, with each view saving its own configuration and switchable in a single click. The main surface stays fast to read; the room to adapt to different organizations sits one layer back.

Outcome

Executive workspace became a single surface on which executives could see trends, goals, and signals that needed attention — instead of piecing the story together across multiple reports and sources.

From a product perspective, the initiative aimed to make the executive offering more valuable and support stronger executive engagement over time.

From a design perspective, the project reinforced an important principle for data-heavy interfaces: surface the most important signals first, keep the hierarchy clear, and support deeper exploration only when needed. That balance made the experience feel more immediate for executives, while still being flexible enough to reflect different business structures, KPIs, and reporting logic.