Report Center — reports someone can actually find
A business intelligence tool for viewing, modifying and scheduling reports. The hard part wasn't the reports; it was the shelf they sit on.
- Role
- Only designer, reporting to a design manager
- Type
- B2B web app — business intelligence
- Scope
- Report organisation into catalogs, generation and scheduling
- Part of
- Zeta's engagement suite, alongside Marketing Center and Power Center
The call I made
Treat the catalog as the product. A report nobody can find has no value however good the numbers in it are, and browsing — not search — is what finance and operations teams actually do.
That meant spending the time on taxonomy rather than on the report viewer, which is the less visible half of the work and the half that decided whether the tool got used.
I owned
- Report organisation into catalogs
- Generation and scheduling flows
I partnered on
- Catalog taxonomy with product
- Direction with my design manager
Where the judgment was
- Treating the shelf as the product
- Optimising for browsing rather than search
About
Report Center is a simple, easy-to-use business intelligence tool that lets users learn and understand their company's data. It lets you view, modify and schedule reports with ease, and reports are categorised into different catalogs that help you navigate and find the one you want conveniently.
I was the only designer, reporting to a design manager. My role centred on optimising how reports are organised into user-friendly catalogs — which sounds like taxonomy work and is really the whole product. A report nobody can find has no value, however good the numbers in it are.
The product
The organising idea
Reports arrive as a flat, growing list — funding, KYC, account holder, clearing, settlement, conversion. Left alone that list becomes a search box and a shrug. Grouping them into catalogs that match how a finance or operations team thinks about their own data turns browsing into a viable way to find something, which is what most people actually do.