Rocío Del Carmen
I joined Sumo Logic with a passion for making complex data more human and accessible. As the lead designer on a full redesign of our core dashboards, I conducted in-depth user research to identify critical pain points, performed competitive analysis, and partnered closely with product and engineering teams to prioritize use cases. I structured the project into clear, achievable milestones to ensure we delivered a streamlined, impactful experience—on time.
As Sumo Logic scaled to handle massive workloads like Kubernetes, our dashboards struggled to keep up—some teams, like CBS during the Super Bowl, had 50+ dashboards just for one event! Navigation was breaking, usability was slipping.
SREs (Site Reliability Engineers) on call were overwhelmed and stressed.
It was a pivotal moment to evolve the dashboard experience—enhancing scalability and accessibility while strategically integrating our 2019 rebrand. This initiative aligned the product with Sumo Logic’s broader business goals, supporting our transition to enterprise markets and preparing for a successful IPO.
I shadowed customers in live incident "war rooms," where our dashboards were projected on big screens and used by SREs under pressure to uncover user pain points. I also ran feedback sessions with our internal SRE team to validate usability and accessibility priorities.
To build momentum for the redesign, I created a storytelling-driven roadshow across the EPD org—comparing the complexity of monitoring Kubernetes to something everyone could relate to: searching for a book on Amazon. This analogy helped align stakeholders around the need for a more intuitive, scalable dashboard experience.
Troubleshooting Kubernetes isn’t easy—teams were jumping across dozens of dashboards just to make sense of what was happening. I explored 3 design directions to help SREs navigate through multiple dashboards:
The local nav won—it made it way easier for SREs to hop between dashboards tied to specific Kubernetes components. But there was a catch: it took up precious space from the actual visualizations. So I got creative—collapsing the global navigation to make room for a smarter, more focused local navigation. The result? A more intuitive, scalable experience that helped teams troubleshoot faster without feeling buried in noise not relevant to context.
Designing filters for high-cardinality data was a balancing act—making them powerful enough for on-call SREs under pressure, yet flexible for content creators setting up dashboards for their teams.
For SREs, I introduced scalable, multi-select filters that cut through the noise fast. With thousands of data points flying in—services, regions, error codes—they needed to zero in on what mattered without writing complex queries. The new filters helped them slice and dice data in seconds, improving Mean-Time-To-Resolution during incidents.
For content creators, I added ways to customize filters using predefined or user-generated categories. This gave teams more control—this was important to increase adoption with our enterprise customers managing large-scale environments.
The result? A filter system that scaled with complexity but stayed intuitive—helping everyone from on-call SREs to platform teams stay focused.
Creating complex visualizations shouldn’t feel like solving a puzzle. The original chart workflow split query input and editing controls across a wide, horizontal layout—making it hard for content creators to focus or see changes in real time.
I redesigned the experience to bring query, customization, and live preview into a single, focused view. No more jumping between tabs—just one streamlined space to build charts with clarity.
To find the right interaction model, I explored 3 directions:
The full-page modal won. It gave creators the room they needed to write queries, fine-tune visualizations, and instantly see the results—all without leaving the dashboard. The redesign boosted speed, reduced cognitive load, and made creating charts feel less like a chore and more like a creative, confident flow.
I took a systematic, scalable approach to the redesign by partnering closely with the design systems team to ensure usability and accessibility were embedded across all core components. In parallel, I developed comprehensive guidelines to standardize data visualizations—covering grid structures, color systems, and accessible typography—laying the foundation for a more inclusive and consistent product experience.
