A government strategic plan with 70 deliverables and dozens of owners usually lives in a spreadsheet nobody trusts.

That was the real problem behind WorkerDI, a platform for a public education body running its 2025-2026 plan. The data existed. What was missing was a way to see, in one glance, what needed a decision today.

Two design calls shaped the whole thing.

First, one health language across every level. Critical, at risk, satisfactory. The same red, amber and green reads the same way on the full plan and on a single deliverable, so a director and a coordinator are always looking at the same signal. No translation between screens.

Second, the interface stays deliberately quiet. Neutral surface, dense layout, almost no color except the status. When everything is gray, the one red deliverable that is 18 days past deadline is the first thing your eye lands on. That is the point.

After 10+ years and 600+ projects, the pattern I keep seeing holds here too: on data-heavy tools, the job of design is subtraction. Take away everything that competes with the decision.

When you build dense dashboards, do you default to a grid of cards or a straight table? I went with both and let the user switch, but I go back and forth on which should be the default.

#productdesign #uxdesign #dashboarddesign #govtech #designsystems

A government strategic plan with 70 deliverables and dozens of owners usually lives in a spreadsheet nobody trusts.

That was the real problem behind WorkerDI, a platform for a public education body running its 2025-2026 plan. The data existed. What was missing was a way to see, in one glance, what needed a decision today.

Two design calls shaped the whole thing.

First, one health language across every level. Critical, at risk, satisfactory. The same red, amber and green reads the same way on the full plan and on a single deliverable, so a director and a coordinator are always looking at the same signal. No translation between screens.

Second, the interface stays deliberately quiet. Neutral surface, dense layout, almost no color except the status. When everything is gray, the one red deliverable that is 18 days past deadline is the first thing your eye lands on. That is the point.

After 10+ years and 600+ projects, the pattern I keep seeing holds here too: on data-heavy tools, the job of design is subtraction. Take away everything that competes with the decision.

When you build dense dashboards, do you default to a grid of cards or a straight table? I went with both and let the user switch, but I go back and forth on which should be the default.

#productdesign #uxdesign #dashboarddesign #govtech #designsystems