Making complex business intelligence simple, secure, and accessible for every user.
DETAILS
The Actionable Intelligence Platform is Black Knight’s next-generation business intelligence solution for mortgage banks and financial services firms. Built on data aggregated from their existing platforms, it enables users to visualize, explore, and drill into operational and performance data, driving faster insights and greater organizational efficiency.
The project focused on redesigning the dashboard creation experience through a drag-and-drop builder with intuitive filtering—making data access and customization available beyond system admins.
ROLE
User Experience Designer | Black Knight Financial Services | 2017
User Interview, Card Sorting, Roadmap Strategy, Design System Creation, Sketch, Invision, Usability Testing
The Challenge
Our challenge was to transform a powerful but highly technical business intellegence system into a scalable, self-service experience. The existing platform created admin dependency bottlenecks, slowed decision-making, and restricted access for business leaders, while years of product iteration had introduced complexity, fragmented structure, and inconsistent terminology. The strategic objective was to democratize analytics without compromising enterprise security, governance, or data integrity.
User Research
I led qualitative research through user interviews with system admins, branch managers, and executive users to capture both operational and strategic needs. In parallel, I partnered with internal account managers to identify recurring client pain points and support issues observed in the field.
Research methods included:
Semi-structured user interviews
Requirements gathering workshops
Usability validation sessions
Card-sorting exercises to evaluate platform language and information architecture
This ensured representation across both technical and non-technical personas.
During the initial research phase, I created a "war room" and while interviewing clients, I would categorize all their ideas or pain points with post-it notes and place them on a whiteboard. This helped the team organize and visualize all feedback. This also helped keep ideas anonymous - they could only tell if it was an admin or executive.
Strategic Insights
Synthesis of user research revealed that the problem was not simply usability, it was structural. The platform’s design reinforced organizational dependency, limited data autonomy, and centralized decision-making around technical roles. To unlock scale, the experience needed to shift from “admin-operated systems” to business-operated intelligence, where access to insights aligned with responsibility, not role. Key insights included: - Dashboard creation was a structural bottleneck that limited organizational agility. - Data access was gated by technical expertise rather than business need. - Legacy terminology and acronyms created cognitive friction and user uncertainty. - Self-service analytics required not just better UI, but clearer governance, structure, and language. - Executives and managers wanted autonomy, not abstraction—control without complexity.
The Solution
A drag-and-drop dashboard builder with intuitive filtering and modular components that enabled non-technical users to create and manage dashboards independently.
Security Transparency
Research revealed that dashboard security settings were a major source of confusion and risk. Users struggled to understand access controls, creating friction and undermining trust in the system. To address this, security configuration was redesigned into a clear, multi-select permission model that made access visibility immediate and understandable. Users could quickly see who had access to each dashboard and create new security groups directly within the workflow, bringing governance, clarity, and control into a single, intuitive experience.
Customizable Layouts
Users expressed strong frustration with rigid layout constraints and limited customization options. They wanted full control over how data was organized, sized, and presented. The solution was a fully drag-and-drop dashboard system, allowing users to place any component freely, resize visualizations dynamically, and structure dashboards around real business needs, rather than system-imposed layouts.
Real-Time Visualizer Builder
Building visualizers was previously a blind process, requiring users to configure components without seeing outcomes until completion. This created inefficiency and rework. We introduced an integrated visualizer builder within the dashboard experience, enabling users to create and edit visualizations with drag-and-drop interactions and real-time previews, supporting faster iteration, higher confidence, and significantly reduced friction in data modeling and visualization.