When showing everything means showing nothing

V1: Everything had the same visual weight.

The first version of the dashboard had everything on it: metric cards, charts and tables, all competing for attention. I thought I was being thorough by showing brokers every piece of information they might need.

But when everything is equally prominent, nothing is. The screen had no clear priority between what mattered first and what mattered later.

The feedback that broke V1

We showed the prototype to the client. The feedback was direct:

“There's too much information. We're looking at too many numbers and charts at the same level. We can't tell what to look at first."

The data wasn't wrong. The hierarchy was. The dashboard was behaving more like a report than a decision-making tool.

The assumption I had to throw out

I had assumed brokers would want to see what the market was doing first and what was moving, gaining or falling. That felt important when I was trying to understand the domain.

But when I spoke to brokers directly, I learned that the priority was actually inverted. They opened the dashboard to understand how their schemes were performing, and then how those schemes compared with the market.

Their question was, “How am I doing?” My V1 was answering, “What’s the market doing?”

The core insight

A dashboard is a sequence of questions answered in order.

So I reorganised the dashboard around three levels:

Pulse check → Trends → Details

Design principle

Organise by depth of attention, not by completeness.
Users scan from top to bottom and go deeper only when they need to. The layout should support that scan, not fight it.