Modernizing data integration analytics

Redesigning analytics platform to reduce cognitive load and meet accessibility standards

I design end-to-end product experiences and the UX systems that sustain them — from early foundations through growth, optimization, and scalability.

Initial company and product state

Initial company state

Axway was a mid-size international corporation that was growing quickly and would eventually become a Gartner Magic Quadrant leader. They had a vast product porfolio at the time and had been acquiring rapidly.

Initial product state

Axway's flagship product, B2Bi, was used by enterprises to manage complex partner integrations, message exchanges, and opeational workfllows. At the time, this product was responsible for the lion's share of the incoming revenue for the company, but had never had a designer and had grown organically over a decade, so workflows were fragmented, next steps unclear, and cognitive burden was very high, both for team members and customers alike.

Challenge

The licensed analytics product created serious friction for both customers and internal teams:

  • Extremely high cognitive load and time-on-task
  • Non-intuitive information architecture that made common tasks hard to find
  • Poor performance and slow interactions
  • No accessibility
  • Data visualizations that were difficult to read even for users without visual impairments
  • No clear path to integrate the product into Axway’s broader platform ecosystem

Approach

Re-architecting the product without breaking legacy constraints

Rather than attempting surface-level UI fixes, I initiated a full information architecture review to identify structural issues driving usability problems. To minimize development risk, I redesigned the architecture by moving entire pages and modules, rather than breaking them into smaller components that would require extensive refactoring.

This allowed meaningful improvements while respecting legacy code constraints.

Designing with accessibility as a first-class requirement

Accessibility was not treated as a checklist item. I conducted comprehensive accessibility testing and documented over 300 accessibility issues across 51 categories, including:

  • Screen reader incompatibilities
  • Poor focus management
  • Insufficient color contrast
  • Non-semantic markup and inaccessible controls

JAWS testing & VPAT creation

I tested designs using JAWS and created a formal VPAT (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template) to document compliance gaps and guide remediation.

There were over 300 accessibility issues, which I categorized and prioritized


Data visualization with color-blind safe palettes

Analytics dashboards suffered from fundamental design flaws:

  • Color palettes were not configurable or readable
  • Legends were too small and too far removed from charts
  • Visual hierarchies were unclear

I redesigned chart systems and created color-blind–safe palettes supporting Protanopia, Deuteranopia, and Tritanopia.

These improvements benefited all users, not just those with color vision deficiencies.

Designing color-blind safe palettes

I created palettes that would work for Protonopia, Deuteronopia, and Tritanopia. This covered both red-green and blue color blindness.

Customer research

To ensure changes reflected real workflows, I initiated a customer collaborative design program, involving:

  • Interviews with enterprise customers
  • Usability testing with both customers and internal teams
  • Iterative prototyping to validate changes before development

This surfaced major pain points, such as the inability to categorize, remove, or manage large volumes of monitoring tasks — an issue affecting nearly every customer.

Integrating analytics into the Axway platform

I redesigned Sentinel to work both as:

  • A standalone analytics product
  • A fully integrated part of Axway’s platform suite

This included aligning branding, navigation patterns, and interaction models so analytics felt like a cohesive part of the overall experience rather than a bolted-on tool.

Impact

  • Reduced cognitive load and improved task completion for core analytics workflows
  • Delivered a significantly more accessible product, meeting enterprise accessibility expectations
  • Improved readability and usability of dashboards and visualizations
  • Informed a strategic shift away from the licensed analytics product toward a different long-term solution
  • Built internal confidence in UX as a driver of product direction, not just UI polish