Data Studio
Intro
Edit Demo Data Like a Spreadsheet
Reprise → 2024-2025, ~8 Months
Principal Product Designer
0-1
New product area buildout
Live
Custom data on your real production app
3
Rapid iterations
AI
LLM-powered data manipulation

The Work
Well, the first version was too technical
The first version was engineering-driven. Even semi-technical users struggled to understand the product architecture. Setup was painful, adoption was limited.

Conditional-based rules builder
Shifting the mental model
I led a rearchitecture around how users actually think: Product Areas (the pages they demo) containing Widgets (the data elements like tables and charts). Sales people know their story and product, so we let them build around that.

Updated landing page with reworked taxonomy
Spreadsheet-style editing
We invested in making it behave like they'd expect, heavy keyboard navigation, row & column section, point & click to select multiple cells. Familiar patterns, less learning curve.

Editing the data driving the chart in the app

Switch Datasets on the fly
AI-powered data generation
Natural language prompts to edit data at scale. Worked closely with the senior dev to figure out what was actually possible for v1 and smoothed the UX. This was a high visibility feature, our own demos depended on it working well.

Initial rough AI dialog flow
Outcomes
Non-technical users could self-serve. Faster demo setup, richer customization. The AI feature became a selling point in our own sales process.
Built out the landing page as well

