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Zuora Design System
Bringing accessibility and clarity to internal sales dashboards
Context
At Zuora, I worked with the Sales Operations team to unify dozens of PowerBI dashboards used across global sales. These dashboards were critical to business operations but suffered from inconsistent layouts, inaccessible visuals, and poor onboarding experiences.
Role
Lead Product Designer with mentorship from 2 SalesOps Analysts
Timeline
May 2023 - September 2023
Impact
40% Reduction
in dashboard creation time
WCAG Compliance
improved accessibility
Scalable System
within PowerBI constraints
Enhanced Onboarding
for new analysts
00 Problem
Inconsistencies creating barriers
The sales dashboards had grown organically over time—each built by different team members without shared guidelines.
A deeper audit confirmed the scale of the problem:
55
unique type sizes
30+
tile dimensions
140+
spacing tokens
7
different fonts
∞
inconsistent terms
01 User interviews
User Insights
I conducted interviews with analysts and sales leaders, revealing three key issues:
01 Navigation breakdowns
Analysts had to relearn the structure of every new dashboard.
02 Poor onboarding experience
It’s hard onboarding new sales analysts and teaching them the dashboards.
03 Lack of accessible design
Visuals lacked contrast, labels were unclear, and layouts were cluttered.
02 Solution space
Testing, Iterating, and Evangelizing
I couldn’t rebuild everything from scratch—PowerBI had major limitations, especially around font control and layout flexibility. Instead, I focused on what could make the biggest difference fast:
Utilizing existing brand guidelines
Zuora had a brand design guideline mainly for graphics and promotion materials. For a unified branding and professional experience, I studied some of the existing guideline in order to select the styles to implement
Selecting core colors based on WCAG compliance
The dashboards and reports had limited data visualizations, and the number of colors that were necessary for differentiation was around 8 ~ 10. Based on WCAG compliance, I selected 8 unique colors for data visualizations, and a color each for the background and text.
Addressing technical limitations
The dashboards were built on PowerBI, which is a data modeling software. PowerBI has limited font choices, and the fonts in the brand guidelines were not available within the app. As a result, I selected the font that was the closest to the one on the existing brand guideline.
Unified dimensions for a unified experience
The biggest cause of a choppy experience was due to the different sizes of every single dashboard. I created a guideline for the layout of the dashboards.
03 Adoption
Testing, Iterating, and Evangelizing
To ensure the system would be used, I:
1
Built
Live dashboards using the new system
2
Gathered
Feedback from analysts weekly
3
Refined
Spacing, grid flexibility, and color rules
4
Documented
The system with usage guidance in PowerBI
User Feedback
‟
The design system saved me time when creating new dashboards.
- Senior Sales Analyst
‟
Before, data locations differed across dashboards. The design system's consistency now allows me to find things where expected.
- Global Sales Leader
04 Reflection
Design systems are more than just components
This project taught me that a successful design system isn't just about visual polish—it's about reducing friction,aligning cross-functional teams, and working within constraints. Even without Figma or code,I learned to bring system thinking into a tool like PowerBI and make it usable for non-designers.
To communicate with stakeholders, learn their 'language'
Starting with limited sales background, my integration into a data analyst team presented initial challenges. Defining goals and talking to stakeholders required me to learn the terms and concepts used in the reports. This self-guided exploration enabled me to effectively identify pain points for the primary users, who were data analysts.