RAIO Dashboard

01 Overview

RAIO is a B2B SaaS platform that helps operations teams track performance across distributed field networks. Their core dashboard had been built iteratively over three years by different engineering teams, and by the time of this project it had accumulated 47 widgets, 12 filter dimensions, and no clear hierarchy of what mattered most.

Monthly churn was running at 8% high for B2B SaaS and exit interviews consistently cited "the platform is too complicated to learn" as the primary reason. The brief was to redesign the dashboard without losing any existing functionality, while dramatically reducing the cognitive overhead of first use and daily use.

02 The Problem

Session recordings showed the same pattern across hundreds of users: they loaded the dashboard, scanned for 15 20 seconds, and then navigated directly to one of three specific views ignoring 80% of the interface entirely. The dashboard was built to show everything; users needed it to show their thing.

A Jobs-to-be-Done study with 18 RAIO customers across five industries surfaced three distinct user profiles the Executive Reviewer, the Operational Manager, and the Field Analyst each with fundamentally different definitions of what a good morning dashboard looked like. There was no single "right" layout. The system needed to be configurable without being complicated.

03 Process

The design process began by classifying the existing 47 widgets into three tiers: tier-1 (used by more than 60% of sessions), tier-2 (used by 20 60%), and tier-3 (used by less than 20%). Tier-1 widgets became the default dashboard for new accounts. Tier-2 widgets became the customization palette. Tier-3 widgets were moved to a dedicated reporting section accessed from the nav.

The customization model went through four iterations. The final approach drag-and-drop layout editing with a live preview, activated by a single "Edit layout" toggle was validated in user testing to take users from "I don't know what I'm looking at" to "I have what I need" in under 4 minutes, on average.

04 Solution

The redesigned RAIO Dashboard ships three default layout presets Executive, Operations, and Field that users select during onboarding. Each preset shows a curated set of tier-1 widgets optimized for that role's primary workflow. Users can then edit their layout by dragging widgets in and out from a side panel, with changes saved automatically per user account.

A persistent alert rail runs along the top of the dashboard, surfacing any metrics that have crossed a user-defined threshold. This means the dashboard isn't just informational it's actively monitoring. Users come to trust the silence: if there's no alert, everything is within normal parameters.

05 Results