Fortis Power
Energy operations, made legible
An operations platform for energy asset monitoring. I designed the dashboard, alerting and reporting experience used by control-room teams — dense information without the wall-of-numbers effect.
- Role
- Senior UI/UX designer — UX, data visualisation, design system
- Category
- Dashboards & Admin
- Industry
- Energy & Utilities
- Platforms
- Web, Tablet
- Year
- 2024
The problem
What was actually wrong
The existing tool showed everything at once, which meant operators scanned it and saw nothing. Critical alerts sat in the same visual weight as routine telemetry, so people built their own spreadsheets alongside it.
The work
What I did, in order
- 01
Shadowed operators to find out what they actually check first, and in what order — the answer had almost nothing to do with the existing layout.
- 02
Designed a strict three-tier information hierarchy: state, exception, detail. Anything that is not one of those three does not go on the primary screen.
- 03
Built a data-visualisation kit with fixed rules for colour, so status colour never competes with brand colour or category colour.
- 04
Designed alerts as a workflow — acknowledge, assign, resolve, annotate — rather than a notification list that grows forever.
- 05
Made the whole thing work on a tablet, because half the shift is spent away from the desk.
Key decisions
The three choices that mattered most
Every project has a handful of decisions that shaped everything after them. These were this project's.
Colour that only means status
One palette, three states, no decorative colour anywhere on the monitoring surface. An operator can read the room's screens from across it.
Exceptions surface themselves
The default view shows what is wrong, not what exists. Everything healthy collapses into a single line until someone asks for it.
Reports people actually send
Shift reports build themselves from what was acknowledged and resolved, so the handover note stops being a retyping exercise.
What was delivered
- Contextual research & workflow mapping
- Dashboard information architecture
- Data-visualisation component kit
- Alerting & escalation flows
- Responsive tablet layouts
- Design system & handoff
Tools used
Files were handed over annotated and component-based, with a live walkthrough for the engineering team.
Have a product like Fortis Power?
Tell me what is not working. I will tell you honestly whether design is the right lever and what I would do in the first two weeks.
madnansakhi@gmail.com