Apana provides smart water monitoring systems to large-scale commercial and industrial clients. I led UX design and front-end development for a customer-facing analytics dashboard that visualized massive real-time sensor data across thousands of retail locations.

The Challenge

Apana needed a fast, intuitive, and visually compelling portal for customers to:

• View water usage trends across multi-site deployments

• Detect anomalies and track alerts

• Understand cumulative savings from interventions

The portal had to handle enormous amounts of time-series data while remaining responsive and usable—especially for clients managing hundreds of stores.

My Role & Approach

I was responsible for both the UX architecture and the front-end programming, working directly with raw sensor data pulled from a Hadoop data store condensed into a MySQL backend and visualized through Sisense.

Key aspects of my approach included:

• Designing all dashboard views and visualizations for clarity, actionability, and minimal cognitive overhead

• Implementing the site as a single-page AngularJS application

• Designing technical as well as visual aspects. Preloading and caching high-priority data in structured JavaScript arrays to predict user behavior and preload interactions

• Creating an ultra-fast interface that navigated nearly instantly—fast enough that I had to intentionally add page transition animations to prevent user disorientation

• Building custom data visualizations that integrated with Sisense but maintained full UX control

  • View analytics prototypes (PDF)

Results & Impact

• The final dashboard offered blazing-fast performance, even on large datasets with hundreds of locations and hundreds of thousands of data points

• Customers praised the tool for its responsiveness and ease of insight—especially at executive levels; it helped to secure a second round of investor funding for the company

• This project stands as a strong example of designing both the interface and its behavior—anticipating user patterns and engineering smooth, rapid experiences that feel effortless