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EnterpriseDashboard DesignData VisualizationDesign Systems

Role - Based Network Operations Dashboard

Comcast's diagnostic platform serves two fundamentally different roles from a single product. This project established a role-based dashboard architecture that adapts layout, data priorities, and workflows to how each role actually makes decisions, with distinct configurations for XPM Supervisors and NNOC Technicians delivered from one unified component system.

ClientComcast
RoleUI/UX Designer
Timeline3 months
PlatformWeb (Responsive)
2Distinct Views
9Divisions
6Regions
TelecomIndustry
Comcast • Celestial Topology — Case Study cover image

Prior to this initiative, no dedicated dashboard existed for NNOC Technicians, while XPM Supervisors relied on a dashboard built in an external tool. NNOC Technicians operated an execution loop monitoring network health, triaging live events, and acting on tasks across regions without a purpose-built interface, while XPM Supervisors operated a coordination loop of assigning jobs, balancing technician availability, and tracking maintenance commitments against capacity, but through a tool not designed for that workflow. The strategic question was not whether to differentiate the experiences, but how far to differentiate them. Two separate products would have doubled maintenance cost and fractured the platform's coherence. The answer had to serve two distinct decision models from one system.

01.
Discovery

Understanding two ways of working

Mapped how each role actually uses the dashboard day to day.

  • Mapped the specific decisions each role makes under time pressure and the exact data each decision requires
  • Traced the supervisor's coordination loop and the technician's execution loop to their distinct rhythms: supervisors scan for exceptions across a team, technicians drill into anomalies on the network
  • Identified where the two roles genuinely overlap, which defined what could stay shared without compromise
02.
Synthesis

Defining role-based priorities

Translated research into distinct information hierarchies for each role.

  • Defined KPI priorities per role: team and commitment metrics for supervisors, network health metrics for technicians
  • Established what surfaces immediately versus what belongs behind progressive disclosure
  • Aligned with product on a single-platform approach rather than two separate tools
03.
Architecture

Configuration over duplication

I designed both experiences as configurations of a shared structural foundation, not as siblings drifting apart.

  • Composed the supervisor view around oversight: jobs organized by commitment status, real-time team availability with direct scheduling access, and maintenance workload summaries that make capacity legible at a glance
  • Composed the technician view around action: regional tabs, high-visibility KPIs for outages, fiber events, TSIs, and CHGs, a task list built for batch operations, and a live event feed one click from detail
  • Held components, data visualization patterns, and interaction logic constant across both, so the platform reads as one product wearing two priorities
04 .
Personalization

Trusting users with their own workspace

Regional responsibility varies by technician, so I designed the dashboard itself to be shapeable rather than prescribing a fixed set of views.

  • Designed flows to create, rename, reorder, and default custom regional dashboards
  • Built a recoverable delete pattern with a Past dashboards archive and one-click restore, a deliberate safeguard since an accidental deletion should never cost a technician a carefully built setup
  • Kept the management surface to a single lightweight modal, so personalization never competes with the operational work it exists to serve
Trusting users with their own workspace image
05.
Detail Views

Depth without context switching

The legacy pattern forced users out of the dashboard to investigate a job. I designed depth into place instead.

  • Designed a job detail overlay with tabbed navigation across logs, completion details, runtime, notification history, time sequence, and job history
  • Merged technician-authored entries with automatic system logs into one timestamped stream, so a node's full history reads as a single narrative
  • Positioned coordination actions, assign to self, assign to team, and merge jobs, inside the overlay, keeping resolution one click from investigation
Depth without context switching image
06.
Validation

Evidence over opinion

I treated both role configurations as hypotheses to be tested with the people who live in them.

  • Ran interactive prototypes through weekly syncs with active key stakeholders including supervisors and technicians
  • Iterated data density and KPI prioritization per role based on observed friction, not stated preference
  • Stress-tested whether the shared system held coherence across both configurations as they diverged, which validated the single-platform bet

The project delivered two role-optimized dashboard experiences from a single unified component system, avoiding the maintenance cost and design drift that parallel products would have created. Each role now reaches its critical data faster because the information hierarchy follows its actual decision loop rather than a generic layout, with supervisors reading team capacity at a glance and technicians moving from network anomaly to action without leaving context. Technicians also shape their own regional workspaces through safe, recoverable personalization patterns, so the platform adapts to individual territories instead of prescribing one view for everyone. Just as importantly, the work established a scalable architectural precedent: future roles can be served as configurations of the existing system rather than new builds, keeping the platform coherent as it grows.

Images
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Comcast • Celestial Topology, 2026

The real design problem was never the dashboards themselves. It was deciding how far two experiences could diverge before one product became two. Designing for the decision, not the role title, is what let us hold that line.

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