Designing a Dashboard for a CIO

A strategic network dashboard that outgrew its brief and became the product's core entry point

Client

Cloud-based Network Management Platform

Role

Lead User Experience Designer

Platforms

Desktop

The Problem

Highway9's single dashboard was trying to serve everyone and therefore serving no one particularly well. The decision to split it into role-specific dashboards meant starting with the two most distinct users: the CIO, who needed strategic visibility, and the IT Admin, who needed operational depth.

Designing for a senior decision-maker who looks at the platform infrequently and needs to quickly grasp network health, growth, and coverage across multiple locations is a harder problem than designing for a power user. The risk is not missing features. It is cluttering the view with information that is not actionable at that level.

Key Design Decisions

Stripping out operational data that did not belong at this level

Early wireframes experimented with combining strategic overviews with technical metrics. Through feedback cycles it became clear that detailed troubleshooting data was not just unnecessary for a CIO. It was actively distracting. The most important design decision on this project was what to remove: we cut anything that would prompt a CIO to investigate rather than decide.

Map view as the CIO's primary mental model

CIOs think about their network in terms of locations and coverage. A map-first layout made the distribution and scale of the network immediately legible, far more so than a table of location names and device counts. Selecting a location on the map scopes all the metrics below it, which felt natural rather than mechanical.

Time range selector as a strategic tool, not a filter

Understanding growth trends, identifying seasonal patterns, and building the case for expanding infrastructure all require a temporal view. We designed the time range selector as a prominent, first-class control rather than tucking it away as a secondary filter, reflecting how central the compare over time use case was to the CIO's actual workflow.

High-level KPIs only, and knowing which four to surface

Agreeing on which KPIs to surface required multiple rounds with the client team. The final set (total connected devices, coverage area, utilisation, and peak connections) was reached through elimination, not addition. Each candidate metric was tested against the question: would a CIO take a different decision based on this? Anything that did not pass was cut.

Process

I began by creating a CIO persona to capture the goals, responsibilities, and decision-making needs of senior leadership, distinct from the operational focus of IT Admins or Engineers. I collaborated closely with the client team to identify which metrics were most relevant to a CIO and why, prioritising data that would provide genuine strategic value rather than operational noise. A key insight was the importance of location-based context: the CIO needed to view infrastructure on a map, drill down by location and time range, and identify usage patterns that could inform decisions about expanding internet services.

Iterations

Early layout attempts combined strategic CIO-level metrics with more technical, operational data, partly in response to a stakeholder instinct that the dashboard should feel comprehensive. Through feedback cycles it became clear this was the wrong instinct: the more data we added, the less useful the dashboard became for a CIO. The major layout iteration was a deliberate simplification, removing device-level diagnostics, event timelines, and granular network metrics, and reorganising the remaining content around the map as the primary visual anchor. A second round of iteration refined the KPI selection itself, narrowing from an initial list of 9 candidate metrics down to 4 through structured discussion with the client team about what was actually decision-relevant at the CIO level.

Final Output

A CIO-facing dashboard featuring a map-first layout with location-based filtering, a prominent time range selector, four high-level KPIs, and a connected devices panel. The design's clarity and broad relevance led to it being adopted beyond the CIO persona. It was ultimately elevated to the core entry point of the entire product, becoming Highway9's primary interface for all users.

Reflection

The most important learning from this project was that designing for simplicity is harder than designing for comprehensiveness. It is easy to add features. It is much harder to defend what you have removed. The CIO dashboard only worked because we were willing to have repeated conversations about what did not belong, and because the client team eventually trusted that restraint was the point, not a limitation. I would apply that discipline earlier in future projects: define what the dashboard is explicitly not for before defining what it is for. The not-for list is often the more valuable document.