Case study — 02 / 03

Maxis Consumers

Increasing usage of an enterprise data-analysis reporting tool through targeted usability fixes.

Maxis Consumers dashboard screen
Company
General Motors
Timeline
May – Aug 2023
Role
Led usability testing & design
Tasks
Heuristic Eval, Usability Testing, UX/UI
Stack
Adobe XD, FigJam

Maxis Consumers is an enterprise tool at General Motors used internally to view data reports, create Meetups, and download data dictionaries. It had gone months without updates due to shifting team priorities — this project was our chance to finally improve it. It was also my first project on the team: I designed independently, in close collaboration with project managers and developers.

Usability testing

I ran a heuristic evaluation of the entire site and reviewed support tickets submitted since the last update, then wrote a structured script covering every feature. To recruit, I asked developers for a list of power users pulled from clickstream data — 12 moderated usability tests in total.

Notes were summarized in FigJam and distilled into two personas.

List of prioritized changes
Operations Engineer — searches reports relevant to her role and creates Meetups, but found the number of Meetup filters overwhelming and the creation form's directions and error states unclear.
Data Analyst — updates data directly for popular reports and knows exactly what he's searching for, but had no way to organize favorites, wanted faster report updates, and couldn't search Meetups by language or tag.

Low fidelity

After gathering inspiration from comparable tools, I sketched wireframes for the highest-priority changes.

Meetup filters — tucked behind a button instead of always-visible, since the always-on tags were overwhelming users.

Meetup filters wireframe

Create a Meetup — switched a vertical stepper to a horizontal one at top to save space, reordered the time/date selectors to prevent errors, and added an explicit "Add" button plus instructions for tagging, for accessibility.

Create Meetup wireframe 1
Create Meetup wireframe 2
Create Meetup wireframe 3
Create Meetup wireframe 4

High fidelity

Final designs were built in Adobe XD, following the product's existing design system.

Reorder favorites — a new homepage feature letting users group and drag reports into a custom order, so they don't have to fall back on browser bookmarks to find what they use most. Full prototype on Figma →

Reorder favorites homepage
Creating a new favorites group
Dragging tiles into a group
Favorites changes saved

Create a Meetup — stayed close to the low-fidelity direction, adding recommended tags alongside the explicit "Add" button. Full prototype on Figma →

Create meetup final 1
Create meetup final 2
Create meetup final 3
Create meetup final 4

Meetup filters — filters live in a dismissible frame; selected tags stay visible outside it even when the frame is closed.

Meetup filters final design

Results

The updated designs shipped by the end of August 2023.

+2,000
New users (20k → 22k)
+20%
Meetup attendance
10%
Overall usage increase

More users started accessing reports directly from the dashboard rather than relying on browser bookmarks for their most-used report, thanks to the new favorites reordering.

Conclusion

I tried to account for every use case, but feasibility meant real trade-offs — I originally wanted favorites to autosave, but after talking with developers, added a manual save prompt instead. We also couldn't address every item on the change list; where an interactive walkthrough wasn't feasible, I updated the help guide instead. This was my first time leading and working independently on a team, and I was glad the final designs held up against everything our usability tests surfaced.