Crafting Systems: Designing Visualization at Scale

In cybersecurity products, charts do not merely communicate, they influence operational decisions and stop breaches. A color can signal urgency. A percentage can imply completeness. A missing category can hide risk. Yet inside many organizations, visualization systems evolve in fragments: similar datasets look different across products, interaction patterns vary, accessibility is inconsistent, and design decisions are made locally rather than structurally. These inconsistencies are not cosmetic but its shapes how people interpret risk and act on it.

This talk explores what happens when you treat visualization not as a collection of charts, but as a system.

The project began as an internal audit of existing charts across multiple product surfaces. We mapped redundancies, misalignments, unclear encodings, and goal drift. What emerged was not just the need for a style guide, but for a shared visualization grammar, one that aligned color logic (including accessibility and brand constraints), chart-type decision rules, interaction patterns, widget design, and labeling standards to user goals. We also introduced a Product Manager checklist to anchor every visualization to a decision outcome rather than an aesthetic preference.

The core idea of this talk is a shift in perspective: from visual consistency to decision consistency. A style guide is not simply a design reference; it is a governance mechanism. It formalizes how risk is represented, how clarity is constructed, and how action is implied. In doing so, it influences not just what people see, but how organizations think and act.

The presentation will be structured in four parts:

1. The Audit: Recognizing fragmentation as cognitive risk.
2. The Framework: Building modular visualization rules.
3. Institutionalizing Vision: Aligning design, engineering, and product.
4. Sustaining Systems at Scale: What breaks under scale, how systems drift, and how coherence is actively maintained.

This topic matters to me because I work in cybersecurity, where visualization directly affects real decisions. When a chart is unclear or inconsistent, it can influence how risks are interpreted and acted upon. This talk connects to ongoing conversations in data visualization about design systems, accessibility, consistency, and trust. It brings those ideas into the context of enterprise products, where visual decisions must work reliably at scale and support high-stakes use cases.

The intended audience includes designers, engineers, product managers, and practitioners working inside organizations who are navigating fragmentation across dashboards or data products.

Key Takeaways:

• A practical approach to auditing visualization ecosystems.
• A framework for building shared visual grammars.
• A model for turning style guides into living systems.