Designing for Extreme Real-World Constraints

Dairy farms lacked a unified system to track feed costs, ensure correct feeding across pens, and reduce human error during mixing and distribution. Existing workflows were fragmented, error-prone, and heavily dependent on manual processes. This case study is about designing when the cost of getting it wrong is a real operational failure, not a bad UX metric.

Fragmented Workflows, Real Consequences

The majority of feeders are Spanish-speaking, with limited formal education, working early mornings and long shifts. Key pain points: language barriers leading to mistakes, accidental taps causing incorrect actions, poor visibility of system status, and unreliable internet on farms.

Psychology as the Foundation

Information Architecture & Core Flows

The system is organised into four primary modules (Home Dashboard, Adjustments, Feed, and Reports), each following identical navigation patterns to reduce learning time and cognitive load.

Information architecture, four-module structure and navigational hierarchy

Five Key Decisions I Owned

Clarity Built into the System

What I Learned

Designing for real-world environments, where users are tired, rushed, and often offline, reinforced that clarity is more valuable than cleverness. Prioritising recognition over recall, designing generously sized touch targets, and surfacing system status at all times.

One Dashboard. Multiple Brands. Two Very Different Users.

A parent company with several brands needed a clear way to view and analyze data across all of them. Teams were constantly jumping between tools, folders, and workspaces. My task: design a unified analytics dashboard, simple enough for marketers, powerful enough for data analysts.

Two Personas, One Shared Space

User flow and scenario mapping for the multi-brand dashboard

A Dashboard That Guides, Not Overwhelms

The final dashboard structure was built around four core capabilities, workspace switching, report editing, insight discovery, and data source management, each designed to reduce a specific type of friction identified in research.

The unified dashboard, all brands and data sources in one coherent view

Five Key Decisions I Owned

Power and Simplicity in Balance

Clarity Over Complexity

This project reminded me that clarity is sometimes more important than complexity. A tool can be powerful, but if people are intimidated by it, they won't use it well. Listening carefully to users, especially people like Sarah, helps shape not just features but the feeling of the interface.

A Product Broken by Its Own Complexity

the client is a financial services company specialising in debt collection and financial management. As the business scaled, its core platform, the core platform began breaking down. Not from a lack of features, but from a lack of structure. The interface was overloaded, navigation fought against how users actually worked, and debt collectors were losing time to the tool that was supposed to help them.

I was brought in as the sole product designer to fix this, but the mandate went further than UI. I was expected to identify what was systemically wrong, shape the product direction, and design a scalable experience framework that would hold up as the business continued to grow.

The Real Problem Wasn't the Interface

Before touching a single screen, I ran product walkthroughs, stakeholder discussions, and a heuristic analysis. The finding was clear: the issues ran deeper than visual design. The platform lacked product structure and prioritisation, it was trying to do everything at once without guiding users on what mattered most.

Designing for People Who Work at Scale

The primary users were debt collectors: high-volume, time-pressured professionals who use the platform across their entire working day. Understanding their real workflows (not the idealised ones) was foundational to every design decision.

Product Thinking Before Interface Design

I structured my approach in three phases before any screen design began. This sequence was intentional, skipping straight to UI would have produced a prettier version of the same broken system.

7 Decisions That Defined the Redesign

From System-Logic to User-Workflow

Product Thinking as the Design Foundation

This project reinforced something I believe deeply: in complex enterprise systems, the hardest design work happens before you open Figma. The decisions with the most impact (restructuring the navigation, introducing pivot-based workflows, making the dashboard modular) were all product-level calls that required stakeholder alignment, not just visual craft.

The biggest shift came from reframing the brief. When I repositioned the engagement from “UI refresh” to “product redesign”, it changed the scope of what I could influence and the quality of what I could deliver. That reframe was itself a design decision, and arguably the most important one of the project.

A Product Redesign, Not Just a UI Refresh

the client is a financial services company specialising in debt collection and financial management. As the business scaled, its core platform, the core platform began showing significant usability and scalability challenges that were slowing down the people who depended on it most.

I was brought in as the sole product designer to redefine the experience from the ground up. My role extended well beyond interface design, I worked closely with stakeholders to identify systemic gaps, shape product direction, and design a scalable experience framework that could support the business long-term.

The System Was Broken at the Structure Level

Rather than jumping straight into UI improvements, I focused first on understanding why the system was failing. Through product walkthroughs, stakeholder discussions, and heuristic analysis, the diagnosis became clear: this wasn't a cosmetic problem. It was a product structure and prioritisation problem.

Designing for Power Users Under Pressure

Product Thinking Before Screen Design

Before touching a single screen, I restructured the product's foundation. I grouped features by functionality rather than system logic, introduced clear navigation layers, separated high-frequency from low-frequency actions, and designed for progressive disclosure, showing less, revealing more.

Three principles guided every design decision that followed:

7 Decisions That Defined the Redesign

From Fragmented to Scalable

The Biggest Impact Came from Stepping Back

This project reinforced something I believe deeply: good design is not about adding features, it's about creating clarity in complex systems.

The temptation in a project like this is to immediately start improving screens. But the screens weren't the problem. By stepping back and asking “what should this product actually enable users to do better?”, and designing everything around that answer, the individual design decisions became much clearer, much faster, and much more defensible to stakeholders.

By shifting the focus from screens to product thinking, I was able to align design decisions with business goals, prioritise user workflows over system constraints, and build a foundation that supports long-term scalability.