A UAE government authority · Confidential
Scaling quality past the team that made it
Many dashboards, many teams, no shared grammar. The output could not be made consistent one review at a time.
The situation
A public authority producing dashboards across multiple teams, needing consistency in information hierarchy, accessibility, data visualisation, components and interaction conventions.
What everyone thought the problem was
That the dashboards needed a design pass.
What I found
The output was inconsistent because the decisions were being remade from scratch each time, mostly by people who were not designers and had no reason to know which chart to reach for. Reviewing the work one dashboard at a time would fix the instance and never the cause.
The decision
Shift the effort from producing dashboards to producing the rules — and make those rules usable by non-designers on distributed teams.
What we made
Dashboard guidelines and a data visualisation grammar: chart selection rules, density guidance, accessible patterns, component anatomy, do-and-don’t pairs, and the governance to keep it maintained rather than published once and abandoned.
What changed
Distributed teams could produce more consistent, more accessible output without a designer in the room for every decision.
What this proves
Scaling quality beyond a single product means changing what other people can do without you.
What this proves
Building a system that raises the floor for people who are not designers.