Overview
Manufacturers use Acelab to reach architects and the firms behind their projects. The dashboard for that work was a Kanban board. It tracked records, not interest, so a rep couldn’t tell a warm lead from a cold one.
🧩
Problem
The board mixed up firms and projects, stopped working at scale, and hid the activity that shows who is actually interested.
📡
Solution
Two tables, Accounts and Projects, with every action a firm takes grouped into signals. Project names stay private until a conversation exists.
🚀
Outcome
V2 launched and is running on real partner accounts. After release, Signals became a part of the product in its own right.
Product
Manufacturer dashboard in Acelab’s Materials Hub
My role
Product Designer
Worked with
Patricia Causey, VP of Product
What I did
Audited the old dashboard, then designed the tables, drawers, navigation and Signals
The reframe
V2 wasn’t only a new layout. It shows every firm and project in Materials Hub, so reps can use Acelab to prospect as well as manage leads. That raised the stakes: once everyone is on screen, most rows are cold.
The call
Show the full market, then make the warm firms impossible to miss.
The trade-off
A bigger list is noisier by default, so signals and sorting stopped being nice-to-haves. The page wouldn’t work without them.
Object model
On the old board, one card held a firm’s name and a project’s details, so a New York firm could carry a Chicago tag. Early planning pointed to two distinct jobs: tracking accounts and working project opportunities. So each got its own table.
The call
Firms and projects are different objects, with different owners and data. They shouldn’t share a card.
The trade-off
Reps now have two places to look. Linking them through the drawer keeps the move between a firm and its projects to one click.
Scale
Each old card was about 470px tall, so only two fit in a column of 100. You can’t scan or compare a list you only see two rows of. A table turns each card into a single row and makes the whole list sortable.
The call
Give up the board. At this volume, reps need to scan, compare and sort more than they need to see columns.
The trade-off
A board shows the pipeline’s shape at a glance, and a table doesn’t. Saved views help bring that focus back, one list at a time.
The core of it
“Last Updated” and “Date Added” say when a record changed, not whether anyone cares. Before V2, each action a firm took was recorded separately. Now those actions are grouped under the firm’s account, and more kinds of activity are tracked, so a rep sees the whole picture.
The call
Make activity the main thing a rep reads, and connect it to the firm, not the record.
The trade-off
Not all signals mean the same thing. A page view is weaker than an RFI, so the list shows what happened and leaves the judgment to the rep.
Privacy
Showing every project creates a real tension. Reps want to know exactly what’s being built, and architects shouldn’t have their projects exposed to every manufacturer. So reps can see a project’s type, budget, phase and location, but its name stays blurred until a conversation exists.
The call
Treat the project name as something earned through a conversation, not something a rep gets by default.
The trade-off
Reps see less than they’d like. In return, architects are protected, and the most valuable piece of information has a clear way to unlock.
Ownership
Education, Promotion, Recommendation and Selection describe a marketing funnel, not work a rep manages. V2 splits that one column into three simple controls, and the default stages are buckets a team can add to.
The call
Reps set stage, status and priority themselves, on the row or in the drawer. Each team can match its own process.
The trade-off
Manual fields take upkeep and can go stale. Automatically moving leads between stages came up as an idea, and it stayed out of this version.
Hierarchy
Every old card carried 11 tags with no labels. “Storefront”, “US Midwest” and “$30–50M” were left for the rep to decode. Moving detail into a drawer keeps the table scannable and gives every value a name.
The call
The table answers “who should I look at?” and the drawer answers “what’s going on with them?”
A detail I’m glad we got right
Project facts come from the architect’s side and update live, while the rep’s own status is kept separate from the project’s real status.
Edge case
A large firm’s work can be spread across regions, so one account rep isn’t always the right person for every project. Reps needed a rule that saves work without undoing anyone’s decisions.
Navigation
“Home” used to mean the pipeline. Now it’s a real starting point, and Accounts, Projects and Brand Pages all have their own place in the navigation. The sidebar also adapts: expanded on Home and Conversations, and collapsed on the tables, where every column counts.
The call
Let each page decide how much room navigation gets. Home needs orientation, and tables need width.
The trade-off
A collapsed sidebar relies on icons alone, and they take some learning. Hovering the logo opens it back up when a rep needs the labels.
After release
Home’s first version led with conversations and brand pages. The update added Recent Signals and a full Signals page, all reachable from the “See all signals” link in each drawer.
Final screens
Six screens from the final design, with all names and data changed. Select any screen to see it full size.
What’s still open
Not everything from the audit was resolved in this release. Being honest about that matters more to me than a clean ending.
Where it landed
A colleague, reviewing real partner accounts after release
What I’d track next
Is it changing what reps do?
Speed.
Do reps act on a signal sooner?
Conversion.
Do more signals turn into conversations?
Habit.
Do reps keep coming back to Signals?
Takeaways
What I took from it
Fix the object before the layout
A nicer board would still have mixed up firms and projects. The real change was deciding what a row is.
More data needs more hierarchy
Showing the whole market only works if the warm firms are obvious within it.
A constraint can be a mechanic
Blurring started as privacy protection, but it also gives reps a clear reason to start a conversation.
Launch is a design input
Seeing Signals on real accounts made its value clear in a way the mockups couldn’t.
