Redesigning a mission-critical oil & gas enterprise platform to reduce friction, standardize patterns, and scale with a cohesive design system.
Enterprise Products is a major oil & gas company in the United States. The EP platform is a mission-critical web application used by internal teams to manage contracts, nominations, orders, tickets, distribution, invoicing, and complex pricing and fee structures. The dashboard serves as the entry point into this ecosystem, where users search, filter, inspect, and edit high-value data every day.
Over time, the dashboard had accumulated inconsistent UI patterns, a messy visual hierarchy, and weak system feedback. Users relied on workarounds such as opening multiple browser tabs, fighting with filters, and guessing how sorting behaved. These issues slowed them down and increased the risk of mistakes in a highly regulated, high-stakes environment.
Users struggled to perform core tasks — searching contracts, filtering results, editing details — without getting lost. Navigation felt clunky, components behaved inconsistently, and the system offered little feedback or guidance. The result was a fragmented experience that made critical workflows slower and more error-prone than necessary.
I joined the project as a Senior UX Designer focused on the dashboard experience. I co-led the redesign of the main dashboard patterns — from search and filtering to tables, detail views, and editing flows — and helped define the foundations of the new design system that would support the platform going forward.
The core team consisted of one Project Manager and two Senior UX Designers, working closely with stakeholders and super users on the client side. We collaborated with product and engineering to ensure the proposed patterns were feasible, testable, and scalable across the different EP platform modules.
We followed a research-driven, iterative process: understanding context with stakeholders, interviewing super users onsite in Houston, auditing the existing UX, then moving into wireframes, testing, and final design and design system work.
We began with remote and onsite meetings with stakeholders and super users to understand the platform's role in their daily work. These sessions surfaced which modules — contracts, nominations, orders, tickets, distribution, invoices — were most critical and how the dashboard anchored their workflows.
"I know how to get there. But a new team member? They're lost for weeks."— EP Super User, Houston session
To go beyond assumptions, we conducted in-person interviews with super users at Enterprise Products' headquarters in Houston. We observed how they navigated the dashboard, what shortcuts they had invented, and where they hesitated or got frustrated in real workflows.
We ran a structured UX evaluation documenting how users moved through the core pattern — Search → Results → Details → Edit — across Contracts, Nominations, Orders, Tickets, Distribution, and Invoices. Each step had distinct friction points.
All Contracts grid showing 325 items. Filter panel shown at top, but users often ignored it and relied on sorting as a substitute.
Filter panel open with multiple dropdowns active. No visual indicator of what's applied. Clear button is passive and easy to miss.
The previous dashboard UI alongside the research process — showing the 4-phase approach: Understand, Identify, Iterate, Design.
The general rule in contracts was that there were no cascading dropdowns on search screens — the panel was wide open because users might not know exactly what they were looking for. However, no way existed to save or recall those configurations, forcing users to re-enter criteria repeatedly.
Users habitually right-clicked links to open details in a new tab. Sorting state was invisible when columns narrowed. "Clear Sorting" became the first action users took upon arriving at any grid — a workaround disguised as a feature.
Details screens mixed editable and non-editable fields without clear visual distinction. To edit, many users opened another browser tab, increasing cognitive load. Modification history (who changed what, when) was present but buried under the actions panel.
Fee management was particularly complex — grids within grids, deep fee detail views, and confusing inline edit icons. The "End Date Fee" action, critical for operations, was buried. Some edit icons were ambiguous and visually similar to view icons.
Using insights from the UX evaluation, we moved into Figma to explore new patterns. The goal was not to reinvent every screen at once, but to define strong, reusable templates for the most common flows and roles.
Once we validated the wireframes with stakeholders and key users, we moved into final design. The focus was on visual hierarchy, consistency, and usability — making it easy to see what matters, understand where actions live, and reuse the same mental model across all modules.
To avoid solving the same problems multiple times, we consolidated the new patterns into a design system. This system standardized buttons, forms, tables, filters, navigation, and feedback components — and defined the color, typography, and spacing tokens that underpin them across the entire platform.
Many of the most impactful changes came from small but deliberate decisions — choosing patterns over quick fixes and pushing back on legacy behaviors that were making users less efficient.
The redesigned dashboard and design system gave Enterprise Products a clearer, more consistent foundation for its internal platform. Users could search, filter, and edit with less friction; teams could reuse patterns instead of reinventing them; and the product organization had a stronger base for future features.
"This project reinforced how important it is to start from real user behavior, not just from screens. By auditing existing patterns, listening to super users, and codifying solutions into a design system, we turned a chaotic, fragmented dashboard into a more predictable and scalable experience."— Xavi Cabrera, Senior UX Designer