Context
EDA builds tools and platforms that help organizations understand their people and retain talent. Originally a single ecosystem with multiple tools, a restructure of direction resulted in two distinct products: SurveyStream and CultureVue. Thought split in two, both still serve the shared purpose of their predecessor: helping companies track culture and leadership in real time. SurveyStream handles structured surveys and 360s, while CultureVue analyzes everyday communication to reveal live data on sentiment, trust, and alignment. Why the bifurcation happened is not a focus of this study, thus, you will see examples from that unified corporate focused brand (e.g., EDA Surveys instead of SurveyStream) in addition to examples post-bifurcation.
I was brought in to help define the design language and UX foundation for the corporate brand and its product extensions. Working directly with the C-suite, I helped set the tone, look, and behavior of the platform’s content — from card to graph, dashboard to dataset.
Outcome
The end result of that collaboration was a data presentation and design system with clearer structure, organization, and intent around the platform’s UX content. Instead of static charts or dense exports, insights became more of a living design that ebbed and flowed within a scalable and consistent system. Executives, HR reps, and other users could move through surveys, dashboards, and trend views with more precision and less wasted effort. This came from both an information architecture (IA) restructure that guided content and several successive visual updates aimed at making content more digestible. That restructure not only dealt with how the end result of data would manifest, but provided a cleaner entry point for building those surveys and analytics gathering tools. Quick to digest, easy to build.
89% higher job satisfaction & 43% lower turnover
The ability to visualize sentiment and engagement in real time created measurable improvement across teams and departments as low as and as high as, the aforementioned stats.
21% higher profitability
Real-time feedback and predictive insight helped organizations act earlier and align leadership behavior with those measurable outcomes faster, which enables stronger business performance.
35% improvement in workplace culture
St. Luke’s reported a 35 percent improvement in workplace culture. Their leadership credited consistent feedback and accessible data visualization for the sustained growth in engagement.
The data itself didn’t change; and the logic was already there. What changed was how people could see and interact with it. That shift redefined the experience of the platform. This was not a company talking about culture, but as one capable of showing it in ways that felt both quantifiable and qualitative. Something usable, something useful. Link to below animations.
Problem
Presenting the most relevant, and most actionable, information is a consistent issue that needs to be solved in any digital experience. For this project, the biggest challenge was the need to create a functional transliteration from print and old web, to a modern digital focus, and then eventually with AI interfacing. A wealth of analytic data and useful insight was locked inside dense systems of content that also were not visually appealing, and felt like an end-year term paper. What should have been meaningful, felt rigid and manual. The information itself was fragmented, with taxonomy and tone feeling uneven. Given the lack of a proper nomenclature that made sense, there was a struggle in both setting up data products for consumption and that eventual consumption.
These issues made it harder for leaders to connect cultural trends to business outcomes, and/or to more quickly set up tools to understand those trends and outcomes. By the time teams worked through the data, the static snap-shot insights could be less relevant and real-time information, buried in weird locations. It is difficult to separate the design system and brand voice work from the platform work, because those evolving systems were crafted to solve problems like that. The system became both a design foundation and a corrective layer for how the brand communicated meaning. Both during the initial unified platform system build, and the divergent product design system re-alignment.
Process/Research
Dogfooding the product came first to get a firsthand sense of friction points beyond recorded user sessions. Auditing the content and data across both platforms followed, along with a comparative analysis of other dashboards and data presentation tools. The review revealed clear opportunities to make insights feel more human, readable and development friendly, which later became some of the validation metrics. User sessions and continued dogfooding revealed many of the same speed, flow, and presentation issues noted in the opening problem statement, illustrating that a lot of friction existed in how information was structured and displayed, both heuristically and visually.
Process/Design
Atypical from most projects, Sketch served as the primary design tool, with Anima as a bridge to React. While developing the color systems for the brand voice realignment and platform bifurcation, the data gathered along the way was applied directly to the interaction, style, presentation, and organization of the different data and information modules used in reports and dashboards (with moderate influence from ShadCN UI). Much of this was built in mid-fidelity, using tools like Miro to map orientation and hierarchy before moving into higher fidelity screens. Multiple iterations were tested in different configurations to see how users would actually interpret the flow. That process helped shape a structure that felt visually cohesive and functionally predictable.
Process/Validation
Outside of direct feedback from leadership and targeted users, there was interest in how the average person would scan and absorb the information. Reports needed to feel functional and readable, not like the data-heavy white papers a professor might submit for a thesis. Comprehension and reading speed improved as we restructured the overall architecture. Much like how I lead this case study with context and outcome, finding the right flow for the platform came from constant testing and subtle adjustments based on how users naturally moved through the data. Above all, products exist to support both the users, and the business itself. Thus, creating a stronger product value can translate into business growth and support.
Below: Selected clients; Projected growth showing the platform/projects overtaking traditional services.
Wrap-Up
Pretty or functional, visual information still has to be digestible and organized in a way that makes sense. Adding polish doesn’t fix a system; it just dresses it up while ignoring the root concerns. A good product needs to work for both the user and the business, and the right design system and approach to content go a long way toward building one that may not solve every problem but meaningfully improves on them.
You’re not just visualizing data or presenting results. You’re giving people something they can trust. That is, something they assume is unbiased and reliable enough to act on. In this kind of work, design becomes less about individual screens and more about crafting a system that gives confidence, where no piece stands alone but all parts work together with almost no slack.