Case study · Redaptive ONE · Codename Denali · 6 min read

From dashboard to platform

I led the redesign of Redaptive’s customer experience, so businesses can understand, monitor and act on their energy and sustainability performance in one place.

My role

Senior product designer, design lead on Denali

Team

Product, Engineering, Customer Success, Sustainability

I owned

Discovery, research, information architecture, interaction design, prototyping, usability testing

DELIVERY & MEASURED OUTCOMES

40%

less time on key workflows

enterprise clients onboarded to the new product

3 mo

from first research to MVP launch

85%

post-launch NPS improvement

Redaptive ONE, the shipped home screen

The short version

Thirty seconds on what happened

The problem

Redaptive was launching energy-as-a-service and data-as-a-service products, and its one customer dashboard was built for a much smaller scope. Customers could see data, but still had to work out what it meant.

What I did

Led design from discovery to validation: interviews with existing clients, five personas, card sorting and tree testing, a new information architecture, and a navigation system iterated three times.

The result

A product people enter at the depth they need, from the whole portfolio down to one piece of equipment. Key workflows got 40% faster, and it became the foundation of Redaptive’s sustainability platform.

The problem

Redaptive outgrew its dashboard

It had a single customer-facing dashboard, designed around its original product. The new offerings needed far more: emissions, goals, projects, invoices and reporting.

Customers weren’t asking for more data. They were asking:

How are my facilities performing?

Where is energy being consumed?

How has performance changed over time?

Where are the opportunities?

What action can I take?

How is my portfolio doing overall?

The legacy Energy Dashboard: one view for every customer

The insight

Nobody described Redaptive’s data the way we stored it. They described decisions.

The same three questions came up in interview after interview. That changed the brief: the job wasn’t to make the dashboard look better, it was to organise the product around how customers act on information. The question I kept bringing back to the team was simple — what decision is this person trying to make?

“Are we hitting our energy and sustainability goals?”

“Where are we doing well, and where can we improve?”

“What’s happening at this facility, and what should I do about it?”

Research

Five people, one product

We interviewed existing clients and mapped responsibilities across roles. Five personas emerged: the people who buy Redaptive, and the people who use it every day.

Finn

VP of Finance

Decision maker, budget holder

Pain point

Can’t link sustainability work to ROI

VP of Energy

Champion, influencer

Pain point

Siloed energy data and manual reporting

Rick

VP of Real Estate

Budget holder, influencer

Pain point

Can’t compare buildings consistently

Sue

Sustainability Director

Champion and daily user

Pain point

Fragmented data, manual reporting and audits

Frank

Facility Manager

End user

Pain point

Disconnected systems, reactive workflows

Information architecture

Card sorting, then tree testing

The card sort showed that people group information by their goal and level of decision, not by the platform’s technical structure.

Card sort with customers

We turned the groupings into a first IA, then tree-tested whether people could find their way:

Where would you go to understand a facility’s energy performance?

Where would you look for portfolio-level performance?

Where would you investigate an underperforming facility?

Where would you expect detailed energy information?

How I led it

Most of the work was helping five groups decide together

I owned the UX direction end to end, from discovery through validation.

Product

Prioritisation, MVP definition, requirements

Engineering

Feasibility, implementation constraints, component behaviour

Customer Success

Pain points and recurring support needs

Customers

Research, validation and usability tests

Sustainability experts

Domain knowledge, terminology, energy workflows

The architecture

Four levels, one product

Showing everything at once overwhelms. The new architecture lets each person enter at the depth they need, and go deeper only with a reason.

Level 1

Portfolio

What is happening?

Executives start here

Level 2

Facility

Where is it happening?

Sustainability and real estate

Level 3

System

Why is it happening?

Energy managers dig in

Level 4

Action

What can I do about it?

Facility managers act

Portfolio → Facility → System → Detail → Action became a scalable foundation for every persona and for future products.

In the product

The four levels, shipped

Each level maps to a real screen. Portfolio → Facility → System → Action — one click deeper each time.

Level 1 · Portfolio

Executives see every site at a glance — color-coded status, regional clusters, and portfolio-wide metrics without a single click.

Level 2 · Facility

Drilling into a site surfaces its energy profile, active projects, and timeline — the view sustainability and real-estate managers live in.

Level 3 · System

The Explorer lets energy managers compare systems across sites, filter by measure type, and spot under-performers in seconds.

Level 4 · Action

Invoices, savings reports, and exportable data — facility managers act on what the upper levels revealed.

Iteration

The navigation, three times

Tree testing showed where the hierarchy and the words failed. Each version fixed what the one before it broke.

Version one: a flat list

Seven destinations at one level. Clear, but every new product would only make the list longer.

Version two: rail and panel

An icon rail with an expanding site panel. Good for going deep into one building, but navigation split across two layers.

Shipped: grouped by intent

Manage, Insights and Account. New products such as Programs slot in without redesigning the shell.

Key decisions

Decisions and their trade-offs

Energy products tend to surface as much information as possible. More data doesn’t create more understanding.

Help people decide, not just report

Problem

Users could see performance, but still had to interpret what it meant.

Decision

Prioritise context and actionable insight over information density.

Result

Less about metrics, more about understanding performance and spotting opportunities.

One platform, many paths

Trade-off

Separate experiences per persona were on the table. We chose one shared structure with different paths through it.

Paths

Executive: performance → trends → impact. Facility manager: facility → systems → issues → actions.

Result

The product stays consistent as it grows.

Design past the MVP

Trade-off

A short-term fix could have optimised the existing dashboard. The product wasn’t going to stay a dashboard.

Decision

Spend the MVP on foundations: scalable navigation, reusable patterns, one hierarchy.

Result

It could grow from a dashboard into a sustainability platform.

Validation

Tested on tasks, not opinions

Rather than asking whether people liked it, we watched whether they could do the work — checking navigation, hierarchy, terminology and how well people read the dashboard.

Task 01

Find the performance of a specific facility

Task 02

Identify an area of poor performance

Task 03

Understand a change in energy consumption

Task 04

Find what to investigate next

Before and after

From information overload to guided exploration

Before: the Energy Dashboard

Dashboard-centric

Data first

Limited hierarchy

One primary view

After: Redaptive ONE

Product-centric

Decision first

Progressive hierarchy

Several levels of exploration

What it changed

The result wasn’t just a better dashboard

The bigger outcome was structural: an experience architecture that could grow with Redaptive’s products and customers, and that became the foundation of its sustainability platform. Programs, Projects and Data Explorer later shipped into the same shell without a redesign.

Reflection

What I took away

Complex products don’t have to feel complex

The experience should follow the user’s mental model, not the shape of the data.

An MVP shouldn’t be disposable

When a product is meant to grow, early decisions about structure and patterns decide how well it scales.

Research counts when it changes decisions

Its value here was in what it moved: the architecture, the priorities and the navigation.

From the team

I had the pleasure of working with Aditya for over four years at Redaptive, where he served as a Product Designer and was a central figure in shaping how Redaptive's digital products looked, felt, and functioned. Aditya brought a rare combination of design craft and genuine curiosity about the business — he didn't just execute on requests, he repeatedly asked the right questions, dug into edge cases, and consistently pushed our products to be more intuitive and user-centered.