Client
Alphaus Cloud
Year
2025
Team size
4
My role
Product Design
Impact
Enabled 2 POCs; adopted by 7 internal users.
Expanded cost data types from 1 → 4, allowing non-technical stakeholders to interpret reports.
Streamlined report generation and improved executive-level budget visibility.
Project context
Insights report's challenges
Octo is a Cloud cost management platform for enterprises. The Insights Report lets engineers generate customizable cost reports for different stakeholders. Prior to redesign, engineers spent hours manually reformatting reports; executives lacked high-level insights.
Scope of work
Led the end-to-end redesign of the Insights Report. Introduced new widgets, report templates tailored to different personas, and custom date ranges. Collaborated with engineers to balance feature complexity with feasibility.
Initial ideas and prototype
Retain familiar patterns while introducing new widgets variants
The first prototype I created aimed to only increase the number of widgets and retain the format of fixed format reporting since I was going with the assumption that the current reporting doesn't cater to all of the stakeholders due to lack of widget variety and not the format.
Demo video of the prototype
My assumptions were half wrong
The prototype report was too engineering heavy still
During the test most users and including the engineers agreed that the report was too dense for executives, who needed high-level information (e.g., "are we within budget %") rather than detailed cost breakdowns. The report was useful for engineering operations but not for business and finance people.
Variety of widgets were good but the experience of creating them should be streamlined
Introducing more widget variants were a good thing since it introduced more ways to create a report but more ways didn't mean it was smooth to create and add widgets into the report. The prototype didn't allowed that since it was a fixed format report and even in the flexible format reporting the widget customization was based on the old format.
Design iterations
Widgets with customizable granularity
A new widget customization flow was created. Instead of choosing independant variants in the last design. User can choose different types of widget type for one data or cost type. This solution enables Octo reporting to scale in the future when more variants of the same cost type is introduced. User would also not be confused and overwhelmed by it.
Persona-specific report templates
Report templates were designed with different granularity in mind which executive report contains the most high level information. Templates save report creators time when generating since they wouldn't have to manually place the widgets. Additionally, they could customize the templates further if needed
Custom date range comparison
The old period selection only allowed selection of up to 12 months which was not suitable for teams who wanted to compare their performance against past period. The custom date range enables the users to compare data between 2 separate time periods and also looking further into the past as Octo stores up to 3 years worth of data.
Ideas that were expanded after shipping
Prioritized features for internal POCs; deferred mini-widgets to maintain focus and speed.
There were a lot of widget explorations done but couldn't made it into the 1st release. Some of the cost type were also not included as I was aiming to ship it as fast as possible for internal POC so that I could get actual feedback and work on the next iteration which was more effective.
Below were some of the newer designs being explored after getting feedback from both the team and from POCs
Mini widgets
Budget widget
