Designing for data on 2.2 million students, a disparate user base, and building trust along the way

Role: Lead UX/UI Designer (ongoing, multi-year engagement)
Platform/Stack: Figma → custom web application (Rails/Hotwire/Stimulus.js/Bootstrap web tier, wrapping Tableau dashboards, hosted on Azure containers, with Snowflake for data)
Team: WestEd Communications, Client Facing Technology (IT), and Center for Economic Mobility project team
Client: California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office
Timeline: Year-long initial build, now in year 3+ of ongoing releases
My Deliverables: End-to-end UX/UI design system; naming workshop and visual identity; accessible categorical color palette for data dashboards; report matchmaker and the Toolbox (contextual guidance drawer) feature initiation

Overview

DataVista is the public data platform WestEd built for the California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office — tracking outcomes for 2.1–2.2 million students annually across all 116 California community colleges and 73 districts, making it the largest system of its kind in the country. I led end-to-end UX/UI design on the platform, which continues to expand today.

This wasn't a clean-slate design problem. The relationship with the client was strained going in, and building a new team while rebuilding trust was as much a part of the work as the design itself.

Purpose & Context

Real user experience and data-timeliness issues with prior tools meant a lot of historical baggage was getting in the way of agile progress before any design work began. Rather than treat that as background noise, I made it central to the process — co-creative workshops and iterative reviews where user input was visibly connected to decisions, all the way up to the client's highest-level decision-maker. The design process itself became the relationship-building process.

Objective

Serve an unusually wide user base — from a Regional Consortium Chair who needs compelling visuals to convince skeptical partners, to a superuser Institutional Researcher who distrusts any dashboard that doesn't match his own numbers — without picking a side between them.

The Results

• 2.1–2.2M students tracked annually
• 116 colleges, 73 districts — the largest system of its kind in the country
• 16 live dashboards and growing, now integrating K–12 CALPADS data
• A strained client relationship shifted into one of the platform's strongest ongoing partnerships

"What you have put together is better than we ever imagined. My biggest concern is that it looks too good! We're going to have to redo everything else!" — Decision-Maker, Chancellor's Office

[Full case study coming soon →] (links to downloadable long-form write-up: the full discovery process, the accessible color system, and reflection)

Meanwhile, check out how DataVista looks today