Open
Influence
The analytics were excellent — and trapped in the shape of a spreadsheet.
Open Influence’s Go Prism platform had genuinely strong influencer data. My remit was the visual language for its reports, dashboards, and decks — so a non-technical brand manager could read them in about three seconds, not decode them.
Good data a decision-maker couldn’t read.
The numbers were right; the presentation asked too much. Rows and columns are fine for an analyst and hostile to a brand manager who needs a verdict now. The design work wasn’t new metrics — it was a visual language that let the existing data land instantly.
Lead with the verdict. Keep the proof one glance away.
The clearest example was the Brand Safety report. Instead of a wall of flagged posts, it opens with a single Overall Risk verdict — the thing the brand manager actually came for — with the creator-post evidence cards sitting beneath it for anyone who wants to check the work.
Resolve the tension between clarity and fidelity with hierarchy, not omission — nothing removed, everything ranked.
The verdict a brand manager came for, first.
Brand Safety was one of the biggest pieces of the work. The shipped report opens on a single Overall Risk reading and a ranked category breakdown — alcohol, profanity, offensive language — so the call is legible in one glance, across every platform a creator posts on.
The flagged-post evidence then sits one scroll beneath: each post with its tags, follower count, and engagement, so a brand manager can trust the verdict and check the work — the answer-first principle from the wireframe, shipped.
Brand Safety Results
Five equal-weight metrics became three scannable ones.
The old creator card gave five numbers equal visual weight — which is the same as giving none of them weight. The redesign cut to three scannable metrics, added a Brand Safe badge, and a one-tap link straight to the full safety report. Same underlying data, a tenth of the effort to read.
A structured read of 15+ platforms.
The visual language wasn’t taste — it was argued. I ran a structured competitive analysis, scored against a psychological-usability heuristics framework, so every choice could point to a reason rather than a preference.
Hierarchy
What the eye lands on first — traced to how people actually read a dashboard, not to layout habit.
Chart type
Each encoding chosen for the question it answers, not for variety.
Density
How much fits before a glance turns into a study — set by a legibility threshold, not by taste.
When the data is the product, legibility is the feature.
The work delivered a report-and-dashboard visual system that put the answer first and the evidence underneath — turning excellent-but-unreadable analytics into something a brand manager could act on at a glance.
No KPI-movement or adoption numbers were captured in the source, so I don’t quote any.