Helping enterprise users quickly filter through thousands of dashboards

LogicMonitor oversees the technology that companies depend on to stay online. This includes devices, servers, networks, cloud systems, and everything that keeps them connected and running. It's the kind of software that's invisible until something breaks, and when it does, the cost of not knowing fast enough can be massive.

Every team using LogicMonitor builds their own dashboards for the systems they're responsible for, so a single enterprise customer could have hundreds or thousands of them. Finding the right one during an active issue meant digging through all of it, at the exact moment speed mattered most.

With a product manager, two developers and myself as the sole designer, we had to ship a redesign in less than eight weeks. Rather than build for months and test at the end, we ran customer calls throughout the project; testing, getting feedback, and adjusting the design in near real time. It wasn't a perfect process, but it meant every decision was validated against real usage before it shipped, not after.

Filtering

The old filters were limited to four simple tabs: All, Favorites, Public, and Private. We added the ability to filter by custom tags and stack multiple filters at once, so users could narrow results by what they actually knew, like a client name or system type, instead of needing to remember an exact dashboard name.

A Better Landing Page

Dashboards used to auto-load whatever the user had viewed last, sometimes taking up to 30 seconds for large, data-heavy systems, even when that wasn't the dashboard they needed. I replaced it with a directory: Recent, Favorites, Created By Me, Date Modified. Instead of waiting on a dashboard they might not want, users landed somewhere useful immediately and could decide where to go from there.

Fixing Search

Search was unintuitive and outdated. Users had to know exactly what they were looking for, or sift through hundreds of irrelevant results. We rebuilt it to feel smarter, returning fewer, more relevant results. Highlighting the search query was a small UI change that made scanning results faster.

Designing for Density, Not White Space

Conventional UX wisdom favors whitespace and breathing room, but LogicMonitor's users were the opposite: people actively monitoring infrastructure wanted as much information visible as possible, not less. I improved contrast, added clearer visual separation, and used iconography and expandable arrows to build hierarchy, all without sacrificing the density this audience actually relied on. Looking back, I'd have pushed even further. Reducing the space taken up by the top bar, page header, and line spacing would have given users more of what they actually wanted: more data, visible at once.