When Ricardo’s project managers began coordinating the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund (SHDF), a spreadsheet was the tool of choice. It worked for a trial across 15 local authorities — but scaling up revealed its limits.
Why a spreadsheet wasn’t enough
The spreadsheet was designed to track milestones for nearly 30 projects. Over time it became harder to manage:
- Too many columns, filters, and colour codes made it slow to update and difficult to scan.
- Monthly reports required hours of manual exporting.
- Sharing through a team drive created version control issues.
- If SHDF was rolled out nationwide, the approach simply wouldn’t hold.
Understanding the need
We worked with Ricardo’s project managers to understand how the tool was being used, what caused the most pain, and what would make the biggest difference.
Some of the key considerations were:
- Device constraints: many users were on older laptops with small screens.
- Priorities: project managers needed to see overall progress at a glance, without endless scrolling.
- Permissions: some information should be read-only, while other fields needed to be editable.
- Accessibility: RAG (red-amber-green) statuses had to be conveyed with more than colour alone.
Even without formal user research, we kept returning to the core question: “What is the user looking for when they land on this screen?”
Designing the dashboard
Using Miro, we sketched wireframes that turned a dense spreadsheet into a structured application. Key design choices included:
- Breaking content into manageable tabs and expandable sections.
- Highlighting primary information first, with secondary details available on click.
- Providing clear labels and indicators alongside colour-coded statuses.
- Keeping filters to the essentials, so users weren’t overwhelmed.
The focus was on layout and accessibility, while the development team used existing pattern libraries to build the interface.
You are basically the star of the show. This is going to be a game changer!
— A member of the SHDF team
The results
The dashboard provided:
- An overview of each project’s milestones, risk notes, and key contacts.
- The ability to filter and download reports directly into Excel.
- Secure access for housing groups and local authorities to view their own projects.
- A shared space to capture lessons learned, so future projects could be managed more effectively.
The impact was immediate:
- Hours of admin time were saved every month.
- Project teams could collaborate more easily.
- Data was managed securely, with one version of the truth.
Not bad for a proof of concept.