I rebuilt Chart Analytics to stop PR teams churning to a competitor

Onclusive is a merger of five companies, brought onto one platform, Onclusive 360, built around four areas: Monitor, Reports, Contacts and Manage.

I led the redesign of one of the most heavily used Monitor pages, Chart Analytics, driving the work across a product manager and an engineer. I owned the research, the design direction and the key product calls; the team executed against decisions I set.

This wasn't a polish job. PR agencies, the core users of this page, were churning to a competitor's platform because Chart Analytics was too hard to read and set up. For an enterprise product, that is direct revenue risk, and it is what put this redesign on the roadmap.

I didn't have historic instrumentation to lean on, so I defined the two signals I'd hold the redesign to: how long it took a user to set up and read a chart, and how often the date-selection flow generated confusion or support complaints. Those became the before/after measures for the work.

[Add the real figures once pulled from Onclusive: setup time before [X] and after [Y]; date-flow complaints reduced by [Z]%.]

Here is what the analytics page looked like before.

I ran the work through three stages: discovery and research, ideation and solution, then final design and testing.

I ran a working session with the team to pull together users' pain points, combining what we knew from past data with fresh feedback.

I ran 7 user interviews with clients and account managers. Below is a summary of the key questions and the answers I heard.

From that data I built a user persona capturing what this page is for and the goals, needs and pain points of PR agents, which I used to keep every later decision anchored to a real user.

Before wireframing, I mapped the user flow for the whole journey so we were solving the real task, not just restyling a screen.

The most contested decision was how many charts to show per row. Engineering pushed for 4 to fit more on screen and reduce scrolling. I wasn't willing to trade readability, the exact thing driving users away, for density, so instead of settling it by opinion I wireframed both layouts and put them in front of users. The test was decisive: users strongly preferred 3, which kept each chart large enough to actually read. I took that evidence back to engineering and we shipped 3, and the readability win became the backbone of the redesign.

I then tackled the top controls. Users kept coupling the “till” versus “compare to” choice with picking a date, so I paired them and folded in the accessibility control that kept surfacing in research. Testing killed the radio-button pattern I'd first tried; users preferred the second option, so that is what shipped.

We had a design system in place, but this page needed new components for the charts and date selection, which I designed and contributed back so the rest of the platform could reuse them.

Here is the final design.

The redesign validated against the two signals I set out to move. 13 users confirmed the new charts were easier to read and understand, and 12 said pairing “till” and “compare to” with the date cut real time out of setting up a chart, directly targeting the friction that was pushing agencies to the competitor.

[Close the loop with the real numbers: chart setup time [X] → [Y], date-flow support complaints down [Z]%.]

The one open issue, a limit on how many brands users could pick, I scoped into V2 rather than let it hold V1.

The decision I'm most confident in wasn't a screen, it was refusing to settle the 3-vs-4 charts debate by seniority or gut. Putting both in front of users turned a stakeholder disagreement into a shared, evidence-backed call, which is how I like to resolve tension with engineering and product.

After V1 I kicked off V2, which was meant to give users more control: uploading their own data, choosing how many charts to show, and sizing the most important charts larger (the last of which I'd pushed for in V1 but conceded on cost). My contract ended before V2 shipped, but the direction and the case for it were set.