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Visualizing the Impact of the Splunk UI Design System in Large Product Teams
Overview
Splunk’s SUI Design System is used by over 30 product teams to ensure consistency, efficiency, and scalability across enterprise products.
I designed a dashboard that visualizes adoption, usage, and system impact—enabling Splunk to treat its design system like a product with measurable ROI and data-informed improvements.
Team
Anjana Menon (Product Designer)
Dan Rotondo (Senior Design Leader) Matt Stokes (Product Manager)
Nam Ho (Program Manager)
Timeline
December 2024 - May 2025
The Problem
Despite being used by over 30 teams, the SUI Design System lacked visibility, making it impossible to measure impact, track adoption, support teams, or improve components effectively.
Why is it important?
without visibility, a design system becomes a black box—teams might use it inconsistently, issues go unnoticed, and leadership can’t make informed decisions. Tracking adoption and usage is essential to
📊 Measure ROI
🛠 Identify gaps
🔁 Improve components
🤝 Drive alignment
Justify continued investment in the design system
See which teams need support or training
See which teams need support or training
Ensure everyone’s building with the same standards
The Solution
Make the design system’s usage visible, measurable, and actionable.
The solution was tailored to the unique needs of stakeholders, designers, and engineers, ensuring each user sees the insights that matter most, and can take meaningful, informed action.
Stakeholder's Dashboard
Empowering leadership with a clear view of adoption and issue trends
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Adoption Funnel
Shows where each team stands—tooltips reveal how many teams are stuck or progressing, helping prioritize support.
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Trends Over Time
Visualizes growth in adoption and modernization—makes it easy to track momentum and spot drop-offs across months.
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Customer Issue Breakdown
Highlights unresolved issues by team—tooltips surface volume and urgency, guiding faster, targeted responses.
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Recent Issues Table
Brings clarity to what’s broken and who owns it—supports accountability and speeds up resolution.
Designer's Dashboard
Helping designers make informed, consistent decisions with visibility into usage patterns.
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Component Co-occurrence Matrix
Reveals which components are often used together—tooltips surface real usage insights, guiding layout consistency and reusable UI patterns.
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Token Usage by Category
Highlights gaps in standardization—designers can see where custom tokens dominate and identify opportunities to promote system token use.
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Component Insertions Over Time
Shows active usage trends—tooltip insights indicate steady engagement and help track how adoption evolves across weeks.
Engineer's Dashboard
Empowering leadership with a clear view of adoption and issue trends
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Prop Usage by Component
Shows where each team stands—tooltips reveal how many teams are stuck or progressing, helping prioritize support.
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Version Usage Donut
Visualizes adoption across SUI versions—outdated versions are flagged with insights to support migration planning and technical clean-up.
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Bug Volume by Component & Team
Connects bugs to components and product areas—helps engineering teams pinpoint problem areas and prioritize fixes.
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Component Hotspots by Volume
Surfaces which components trigger the most reported issues—tooltips offer quick interpretation to inform design system QA.
How did I get there?
🔍 Persona Mapping & User Research
✏️ Ideation & Wireframing
Interviewed and surveyed 20+ team members and stakeholders across roles to understand their needs, frustrations, and what insights they lacked from the design system.
Explored how to best represent key metrics—experimented with different data visualizations to match the type and purpose of each insight.
🧪 Testing & Final Designs
Tested dashboard layouts with real users, iterated on views based on feedback, and refined the experience to support decision-making for each user group.
Learning & Takeways
Design Systems Are Products Too
I learned that design systems need to be measured, improved, and supported just like any product, especially at scale.
Making Data Actionable
It’s not enough to show data—how you visualize it determines whether people can understand and act on it. Crafting meaningful tooltips and surfacing key trends made insights more accessible.
Recognizing the System-Wide Impact
a design system influences every pixel our customers see. Its reach is company-wide, and its effectiveness directly shapes the user experience, making visibility and consistency critical.
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