Process
Research → wireframes → three-tier dashboard system
I was embedded directly with UPRR staff throughout the engagement — not working remotely or through an account team. I conducted interviews with engineers, domain managers, and executives, and ran alignment sessions with senior leadership to drive company-wide adoption of the design direction. That direct access meant the designs were grounded in how UPRR actually operated, not in assumptions filtered through intermediaries.
The critical finding from research: when an outage occurred, alerts were sent as emails — to many engineers at once, with no clear assignment of ownership. Engineers were receiving so many outage emails that they didn't know which ones demanded their attention, and no one could tell at a glance who was already working on an incident. The platform wasn't just a visibility gap; it was producing active confusion at exactly the wrong moment. That insight directly drove two of the most important design decisions — the Tier 1 ground-level view with clear service ownership mapping, and the alert prioritization logic that surfaced what was critical rather than flooding the operator with everything at once.
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Conducted interviews with UPRR staff to understand operational workflows and pain points
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Designed a three-tiered dashboard system serving distinct user roles across the organization
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Ran executive alignment meetings to drive company-wide adoption of design direction
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Iterated through research → wireframes → high-fidelity designs
The Three-Tier Dashboard System
The three-tier structure wasn't arbitrary — it was the answer to three related problems at once. Different user roles needed fundamentally different levels of detail: a ground-level engineer needed to see every service connection and deployment unit to trace root causes; a domain manager needed a view of their world to ensure operational health; an executive needed a single health score and a way to know where to intervene. Collapsing these into one view would have caused alert fatigue and made the tool useless for everyone. The three tiers also mirrored how UPRR itself was organized, making adoption natural.
Tier 1
Ground Level
Shows how all services, events, and deployment units connect — enables root cause analysis and connection understanding for engineers
Tier 2
Domain Owner
Allows managers to monitor their domain, drill in, and ensure operational efficiency across their area of responsibility
Tier 3
Macro Health
Executive view with high-level health status and intervention prompts — the right signal at the right altitude
Ground level view — service connections, events, and deployment units for root cause analysis
Domain owner view — managers monitor their domain and drill into issues
Macro health dashboard — executive view with intervention-level visibility
"I would love to understand how you come up with all of this because it is fantastic."
— Arun Giri, AVP Lead Engineer, Union Pacific
