Sustainable Rail Dashboards [RSSB]

RSSB represents safety, standards and sustainability in UK rail.

As part of their new "Sustainable Rail Blueprint", a document outlining the future for a sustainable rail sector in the UK, RSSB wanted to conduct discovery work into a series of new data dashboards that allowed the public, its members and other industry stakeholders to track sustainability performance on their website. 

I was tasked with understanding the business landscape, then developing wireframes, interactive prototype and UI design for the first iteration of the product.

The dashboards in this case needed to be split into 3 different areas: public, members and industry stakeholders - of which each had their own level of technical understanding.

It was clear that the design approach would need to follow this hierarchy of technical understanding - the data needed to be presented to the user groups in different ways.

Initial sketching

I took a "narrative" style approach for the public-facing  dashboard - explaining the different working parts, and disclosing basic graph data progressively to avoid overwhelm.

For the industry stakeholder dashboard, I created an executive summary for the user, an overview that allowed the user to see industry performance at a glance.

The example shown is for the members area. I designed this area to afford the user more configuration control. The user could select one or multiple sub-categories, and graph them over time.

Each graphical component was designed with configuration controls, including time, filtering and exports.

Each sub-category also featured the key target, a brief description and the RAG status against the target.

Members dashboard example wireframe

The digital identity documentation from RSSB was clear and concise. My brief was to create a UI design that offered a “seamless” transition from their existing website, using existing colours and design conventions.

Each group of categories had its own identifying colour and I was able to create a link between each category and its child elements by using a strategic amount of that colour.  

Members dashboard UI design

The interactive prototype was presented to the client in Q3 2023, who approved it for production in Q1 2024 after a successful period of prototype testing with members and stakeholders.

The feedback on the design and usability was overwhelmingly positive - amendments to the original design presented were mainly cosmetic, and the client was delighted with the efficiency of the process.

The client believed that it would present a flexible and versatile product that spoke to all their key user groups. This in turn would help grow a more informed rail sector ready to take action on the back of the data.