the Project
Project Brief & Kickoff
Imagine you're a growing business. Every day, you're switching tabs between Google Analytics, Stripe, your CRM, and a dozen spreadsheets—just to answer one question: “Are we growing?” Now imagine doing this week after week, feeling the pressure of data overload but still not having a clear view of your business performance.
This is the reality for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). While they’re busy serving customers, they’re held back by scattered data, clunky dashboards, and decision-making bottlenecks. Growth shouldn’t feel like guesswork. But for many, it does.
Project Goal
To design a unified, intuitive SaaS dashboard that gives SMBs a clear, real-time view of their performance—from sales and subscriptions to growth metrics—all in one place.
We conducted User Research & Insights, based on research, three key pain points were identified:
0.1 - “It takes too long to pull reports across different tools.”
0.2 -“I’m not sure what metrics I should be paying attention to.”
0.3 - “Most dashboards are too technical or bloated for small businesses.”
Mapping the People Behind the Pain Points
After synthesizing research data and empathy maps, I mapped out key user personas that reflected the real challenges faced by small-to-medium business owners. These personas helped align the team around user goals, frustrations, and motivations—and ensured every design decision was rooted in real-world needs.
Empathy Mapping: Getting Into the Minds of Our Users
To truly understand our users, we built empathy maps based on real conversations with small business owners and SaaS founders. This helped us visualize their world—what they think, feel, say, and do as they try to manage performance metrics.
Information Architecture
We began with user flows, mapping out key touch points.
UX Strategy & Design Goals
Our Core Objectives was to Design for clarity, Make it usable even for non-technical users over complexity and Aggregate KPIs from analytics, finance, and CRM platforms & Provide real-time data at a glance
UI Design & Visual Language
We created a clean, modern UI with: Neutral backgrounds and vibrant accent colors for key insights, Clear data visualizations using line, bar, and donut charts and Minimalist typography for easy readability
We conducted moderated usability testing with 5 business owners
Reflection & Next Steps
This project reminded me that good design isn’t about adding more—it's about taking away everything that’s in the way.
Final Thoughts
For SMBs, data is power—but only if it’s accessible. This SaaS dashboard wasn’t just about aggregating tools; it was about designing peace of mind—helping people run their business smarter, faster, and with confidence..