It asked me to improve the reporting flow, which sounded perfectly clear right up until I looked at the reporting flow.
The flow was fine. The problem was that people didn’t trust the numbers inside it and had no idea what to do with them. You can redesign that screen as many times as you like and nobody will trust those numbers one bit more. They’ll just distrust them in a nicer font.
To be fair, whoever wrote it wasn’t doing anything wrong. That’s just how briefs get made. Someone sees a number drop and has a theory about why, and the theory becomes the brief. Nobody goes back to check it, because everyone’s busy, so by the time it reaches a designer, a hunch from a meeting has turned into a Jira ticket with a due date.
So now I ask one annoying question before I touch Figma: is this even the right problem? In real life it looks a lot less heroic than it sounds.
Mostly it’s me asking where a claim came from. "Users find this confusing." Which users? Can I watch one being confused? Sometimes there’s a recording. Sometimes it turns out someone’s cousin said it at a family lunch.
Each finding links to what was seen
Research findings
Finding
Users find the reporting flow confusing.
Usability test of the reporting flow · 8 participants · 4 to 6 March 2026
Seen in 3 of 8 sessions
Participant 2 · 14:32 in the recording
"Is this total for March, or for the whole year?"
Participant 5 · 08:15 in the recording
Went back to the date filter twice before reading the total.
Participant 7 · 21:47 in the recording
"I’d have to check the dates in the export before I sent this to anyone."
The other 5 read the totals without hesitating.
Illustrative example
The claim has no source
Ticket
Description
Users find the reporting flow confusing.
Raised in the Q1 planning meeting.
No study, sessions or recordings are linked.
Illustrative example
The rest is checking whether the business problem and the user problem are still holding hands. Usually they are. Sometimes they break up without telling anyone.
Please don’t become the designer who interrogates every brief like it’s a suspect, though. Plenty of briefs are great. Ask, listen, and if it holds up, get to work.
In the reporting project, it finally clicked in the third user session. A user read the dashboard, understood it, and then just sat there. They were waiting for some sign that the numbers were worth acting on, and the product never gave them one. I remember being relieved and a bit annoyed, because now I knew, and it was my problem.
They needed help deciding. A prettier report would have let them wait in style.
For me, that’s most of the jump to senior. At some point, checking the question becomes part of your job. You won’t always win that conversation, and sometimes nobody will invite you to it. Ask anyway. A slightly awkward meeting beats six weeks of gorgeous work on the wrong thing.