Transforming Spreadsheets into an Alert-Driven Decision Support System
“Thanks to the new system, I can now easily identify at-risk organizations and the missing materials, which has made my workflow much more efficient.”
– Program staff feedback
A fragile, multi-sheet Google Spreadsheet created visibility gaps, inconsistent workflows, and operational risk. I redesigned the system into a unified CRM built around clarity, alert prioritization, and faster decision-making for staff and leadership.
Project Snapshot
- My Role: Lead UX Designer — product strategy, discovery, interaction design, and design-system development
- Team: Sponsor, PM, 2–3 developers, program staff, finance
- Timeline: Discovery (4 weeks), build & testing (8–12 weeks), ongoing iteration
- Scope: Redesigning a fragile spreadsheet into a responsive CRM for milestones, alerts, reporting, contacts, and invoicing
Leadership
- Defined UX vision, success metrics, and measurable outcomes
- Led critiques, task-flow reviews, and cross-functional alignment
- Created a lightweight design system (tokens, components, interaction patterns)
- Mentored developers on accessibility, semantics, and reusable UI architecture
Context
Staff across the Action Collaborative needed a clear, reliable way to understand which organizations were on track, behind, or at risk — something the legacy spreadsheet couldn’t support as participation grew.
Problem
A multi-sheet Google spreadsheet created overwrites, inconsistent edits, and slow follow-ups. Missing materials and at-risk organizations were frequently overlooked due to limited visibility and unclear workflows.
Solution
I redesigned the system into a unified, role-based CRM with alert logic, clearer organizational and representative management, improved reporting, and responsive layouts — reducing ambiguity and speeding up triage.
Research & Strategy
Reframing an External Proposal into a Research-Led Solution
Before I was involved, an external firm proposed a generic dashboard and edit screens. Stakeholders felt the design was visually noisy, disconnected from real workflows, and did not scale with growing organizational complexity.
My assessment: the proposal lacked clear task flows, alert prioritization, and a scalable way to represent risk and expectations.
What I did: led a lean discovery and created a counterproposal grounded in user journeys, rubric-based alerts, and measurable outcomes rather than just “better UI.”
Identifying User Groups & Developing Personas
Occupation: Sr. Program Officer | Age: 44
Katie manages relationships with stakeholders and sponsors, oversees committees, and ensures reports deliver on time. With limited availability, she delegates daily tasks to Tasha.
- Maintain organizational relationships
- Track milestones and outcomes; ensure required information is provided
- Intervene when milestones are missed
- Oversee reports and invoicing
- Hard to track organizations in the spreadsheet
- Report creation is time-intensive
- Managing contacts and bulk emails is cumbersome
- Checks dashboard alerts at a glance
- Collaborates closely with Tasha
- Reviews reports for accuracy
- Primarily desktop; occasional mobile
Advanced — power user with strong guideline familiarity
- Mostly desktop at work
- Occasional mobile/tablet
“I want a snapshot of organizations at a glance without digging through a spreadsheet.”
Occupation: Program Assistant | Age: 25
Tasha assists Katie with updates to organizations and reps, uploads/curates materials, and helps create reports. She is less familiar with the engagement rubric.
- Make updates to organizations and reps
- Create reports efficiently
- Reach out for missing material
- Report creation is time-consuming
- Hard to track milestones given rubric familiarity
- Editing organizations/reps in spreadsheets is error-prone
- Looks to Katie for guidance
- Frequently edits/adds materials
- Primarily desktop; occasional mobile
Beginner — needs to reference guidelines frequently
- Mostly desktop at work
- Occasional mobile/tablet
“Make editing easy so I can focus on reports.”
Discovery: Framing the System, Not Just Screens
I audited existing reports, slide decks, and print artifacts, and ran listening sessions with staff to understand how they defined “risk,” “compliance,” and “success.”
Outcome: a shared rubric for risk states, a focused set of workflows (track, follow up, report, invoice), and a visual language that supports calm but urgent alerting.
Designing the Counterproposal: Decision Support, Not Just UI
I created high-fidelity prototypes that expressed the new rubric and workflows: a risk-focused dashboard, an organization list with inline alerts, and an edit view that surfaced context and next steps.
- Give program officers a trustworthy portfolio snapshot
- Make it obvious where action is needed and why
- Keep the layout clean, calm, and low-friction
The steering group selected the research-led counterproposal, and I continued as UX lead through build and launch.
Designing for Awareness: Alert-Driven Dashboard and Lists
I designed the dashboard around rapid triage, surfacing the most important organizational and representative signals first. Colors follow med-tech restraint: neutral by default, with sparing use of status tints for clarity without alarm fatigue.
- Defined a limited alert color system to prevent fatigue
- Standardized alert card layouts across dashboard + lists
- Aligned typography, spacing, and component tokens with the larger design system
Status Breakdown: System-Level View of Organizational Health
The Status Breakdown view expands on the dashboard’s high-level counts, allowing staff to see all organizations grouped by Meeting Expectations, Warning Signs, Significant Issues, and At-Risk states. Each group provides quick access to drill-down tables, AI-supported indicators, and links to the organization records behind each status.
- Portfolio-level visibility across all organizations
- Faster triage across engagement states
- Jump from category to organization records in one step
- Supports future AI flagging for risk prediction
Surfacing Risk in the Organization List
The redesigned organization table surfaces status at a glance. Alerts show both the type and count of issues, while expandable rows provide the context behind each warning, including missing materials, overdue deadlines, and required follow-ups.
Organization Edit: A Workspace Designed for Guided Remediation
The Organization Edit view brings alerts, missing materials, and next steps directly into the workflow. Instead of switching between separate tools or pages, staff can review issues, upload documents, contact representatives, and mark items as resolved — all in a single structured workspace.
Filtering for Rapid Triage
A fixed slide-in filter panel enables rapid triage across organizations. Users can filter by warning signs, significant issues, membership type, and missing documents without losing table position. The panel pushes content aside rather than overlaying it for better context retention.
Representative List: Unified View for Roles, Status, and Outreach
The redesigned representative list brings roles, working groups, participation status, and contact details into a single view. Staff can quickly identify who to reach out to, copy email lists, and pivot from status signals directly into outreach without navigating separate screens.
Expectation Accountability Framework: Managing Thresholds, Rules, and Signals
I designed a multi-tier alerting model that formalized previously ambiguous rules into a clear risk rubric.
The system escalates organizations from Expectations → Warning Signs → Significant Issues
based on
time-based thresholds, missed actions, and behavioral patterns.
I led the effort with program staff to turn scattered criteria into a structured, automatable model —
reducing ambiguity and enabling consistent triage, earlier intervention, and predictable staff response. The
resulting logic closely mirrors the escalation, timing, and decision-support patterns used in med-tech
environments.
Editing a Criterion
Each criterion can be edited in a structured modal, allowing administrators to adjust labels, assign categories, and configure threshold logic for both warning signs and significant issues. This interaction pattern reinforces clarity and reduces errors when modifying rules.
Validating Impact: 75%–100% Gains in Task Ease Across Core Workflows
To validate the redesign, I ran a Customer Effort Score (CES) study across five representative workflows in the legacy spreadsheet and in the new CRM. Staff completed tasks and rated effort on a 1–7 scale. Every workflow showed a 60-point improvement in “Easy/Very Easy” ratings.
Business Impact Summary
Workflows were rated 50% easier post-launch. The cost-savings scenario in the efficiency analysis shows how this scales to annual hours returned to staff.
A 75% improvement in alert visibility enables earlier and more confident intervention on at-risk organizations.
Clearer workflows and consistent patterns reduced support interruptions, freeing staff time for higher-value work.
Outcome & Next Phase
The redesigned CRM delivered a 75% increase in alert visibility and a 50% improvement in overall workflow ease, while significantly reducing support friction across the initiative.
As the Staff-level UX lead, I guided the project from discovery through launch, establishing the patterns, metrics, and governance that now support continued expansion of the rubric management and billing workflows in the next phase.