Clarity & Data Hierarchy | Financial Dashboard
Reducing cognitive load in everyday financial decision-making.
A business finance dashboard restructured to make cashflow health, overdue risk, and financial priorities immediately legible — without removing data.
- Industry
- SMB Finance / Accounting
- Scope
- Product Structure, Data Hierarchy, Decision Flow
- Role
- Product & Narrative Partner
Context
The dashboard already contained all essential financial data — revenue, expenses, payables, receivables, invoices, and trends.
Yet users struggled to answer simple questions quickly: what needs attention now, where money is stuck, and whether the business is actually healthy.
The problem was not access to information, but interpretation under everyday time pressure.
The legibility problem
Financial signals competed for attention instead of guiding it. Charts, summaries, and status indicators carried equal visual weight, regardless of urgency or consequence.
- Equal-weight data: Critical overdue risk looked similar to stable metrics.
- Color overload: Saturation increased visual noise without directional meaning.
- Fragmented insight: Users stitched meaning across multiple widgets.
- High cognitive load: Decision-making required memorizing and comparing values.
Structural decisions
Hierarchy before density
Information was reorganized around decision priority. Summary came first, diagnosis second, and detail last.
Visibility of consequence
Overdue amounts, time delays, and blocked cash were surfaced as primary signals, not buried states.
Color as meaning
Color usage was reduced and reassigned to indicate urgency and risk, not decoration or volume.
Before
After
Outcome
- Faster understanding of financial position
- Reduced cognitive load during repeat usage
- Clearer visibility into overdue and at-risk items
- More confident day-to-day financial decisions
- Dashboard perceived as decision-support, not data-heavy
Insight
“Clarity in finance isn’t about showing more data. It’s about making the right data unavoidable.”
When hierarchy is clear, users stop reading dashboards and start acting with confidence.