Brightspot Dashboard and Design System
Delivered a scalable and intuitive design system while accelerating product improvements, reducing design debt, and enhancing user experience.
Brightspot, an enterprise CMS platform, set out to modernize and scale its design system. The outdated system made progress slow but had limited buy-in. I helped shape a strategy that delivered quick design wins and built the foundation for a platform-wide evolution.
Several challenges included stakeholder skepticism, robust customization, responsive and accessibility needs, and an overwhelming old dashboard.
"We usually just improve the whole look every 5 or 10 years." – Dylan, Brightspot
With stakeholder goals unclear, I stepped back to uncover deeper issues and craft a design strategy that addressed immediate pain points while planning for broader system improvements. This groundwork gave both Dylan's team and mine the clarity we needed to secure stakeholder approval for the larger design system initiative.
I started by benchmarking competitor dashboards and interviewing Brightspot stakeholders, engineers, and platform users. Research showed dashboards needed to be responsive, consistent, and focused on quick actions. Interviews revealed how admins use dashboards, widgets, and workspaces daily, providing insights to guide design improvements.
65% of admins struggle with navigation complexity.
78% of users found the interface overwhelming.
Using research, I created personas and audited the platform's current structure. This helped us understand user pain points, uncover inefficiencies, and identify opportunities for improvement across workflows and content management.
I collaborated with the team to turn insights into purposeful iterations. We inventoried the navigation and refined the information architecture, sketching flows based on benchmarking, user input, and admin workflows.
Low-fidelity wireframes visualized hierarchy, layout, and flow, helping engineers plan functionality changes. Multiple design iterations tested ideas with accessibility improvements embedded throughout.
Once initial designs were aligned, I consolidated key pages and linked prototypes for users, admins, and stakeholders to interact with.
Testing revealed that the fixed left rail limited flexibility, widget sorting and viewing needed more clarity, and while content creation was intuitive, users often customized widgets during setup. This feedback guided refinements that made the dashboard more usable, flexible, and aligned with real workflows.
The final designs delivered a modern, scalable dashboard for both desktop and mobile, consolidating UX and UI improvements across the platform. Stakeholders were impressed by the process and results, green-lighting the upgrade to the full design system.
Over time, I built the design system library using audit insights as a blueprint, creating components, sheets, and templates to support ongoing UX and UI improvements. I also embedded myself within Brightspot's internal team, taking a lead design role and expanding the project into platform-wide design enhancements powered by the new system.
Credits
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