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Industry
Commodities Trading
Client
Cargill
Role
Lead Product Designer

Alpha Centauri – A reporting and analytics tool for Traders

  • Data Platform
  • UI/UX
  • Fintech

My Contribution

Owned

  • Research through to delivery
  • Mapping trader, hedge desk, market risk, and merchant workflows
  • Designed the new platform end to end

Led

  • Reviews with stakeholders and users
  • The design from wireframe through prototype to build
  • Design system governance & contribution

Impact

  • Saved roughly $1,000 per user per year
  • 20,000+ page views in first 6 months
  • Replaced fragmented third-party tools with one platform

The Problem

Traders and Analysts across Cargill’s Canada and Mexico operations were working across multiple third-party tools with no standardisation between them. Reports didn’t match from one system to the next. Errors crept in. Costs were high for what the tools actually delivered, and trust in the data was low.

This wasn’t a case of one bad tool. It was several tools, each solving part of the problem, none of them talking to each other.

The platform needed to give traders and analysts real-time data access, without losing the speed or flexibility they already had. Not a stripped-down replacement. Something that could stand in for everything the old tools did, and do it better.

Diagram: SAP HANA feeds KNIME, Tableau and Power BI, which all feed Excel before reaching traders, analysts and the risk desk. Problems: reports don’t match, errors creep in, high cost and low trust, repetitive manual tasks.

The Challenges

I ran research to understand who was actually using these tools day to day: traders, the hedge desk, market risk, merchants. Each group had a different relationship with the same data, so I mapped their existing workflows in detail before designing anything new.

That mapping mattered more than it might sound. The real risk wasn’t building the wrong features. It was building a platform that didn’t carry over what people already relied on. If it didn’t, they’d fall back to the old tools and nothing would have changed.

So the brief wasn’t just “build one platform.” It was:

build one platform familiar enough to adopt, while still being simpler than what it replaced.

From there: reviewed the mapped flows with stakeholders and users, designed new flows, wireframed, then prototyped.

User flow map of the mapped trader and analyst workflows
Initial flow diagram for users in Canada
Adjustment wireframes laid out as a feature workflow
Adjustment wireframes and feature workflow

The Product

Live data indicator with last-refresh time above the report columns

Real-time data access, streaming live and snapshot data so users always see current information

Filters panel with searchable report filters

Interactive, customisable reporting with filtering, sorting, and views tailored to individual users and teams

Full Grain Premium report on screen

Support for large, complex financial datasets without a hit to performance

Adjustment summary dialog with reason code and comments

Direct edits and bulk uploads – Allowing users to correct and completing data governance at scale

After Launch

Shipping Centauri wasn’t the finish line. Once it was live, I ran a second round of research to see how people actually used it, not how we’d assumed they would.

I combined behavioural data from Datadog (session replays, heatmaps, export and error tracking) with focus groups, one-to-one interviews and day-in-the-life sessions.

The headline finding was uncomfortable but useful. People trusted the data, but they were still finishing their analysis in Excel. The heatmaps made it plain: clicks clustered on Snapshots and Export.

I ranked every finding by severity, and three changes shipped as a direct result: bulk adjustments, clear refresh status, and a rework of Saved Views.

Datadog click heatmap over the Centauri report, with hot spots on Snapshots and Export
Datadog heatmap, one month of usage
User session synopsis for a senior analyst: key usage, what’s good and bad, concerns, ideas, automation and actions
Saved views panel with pinned and locked views and a hover preview

Saved Views

Saved Views was one of the clearest problems the research surfaced. Analysts were building views for their teams, but there was no way to protect them. Anyone could change a shared view by accident, so people fell back on old habits: duplicating spreadsheets and protecting tabs to keep a trusted version safe.

The list itself had become a problem too. Every analyst’s personal views sat alongside the shared ones, with no way to filter them, so finding the right view meant scrolling and guessing.

I reworked Saved Views around both issues. A senior analyst can now lock a master view, so everyone else can use it without being able to change it. The views people rely on most can be pinned to the top, and search, sorting and a quick hover preview make the right one easy to find.

The result: one trusted version of each view, maintained by the people responsible for it, instead of copies scattered across spreadsheets.

The Result

Centauri went live for Canada and Mexico in six months, and passed 20,000 page and report views. It partially replaced the third-party tools, saving roughly $1,000 per user per year, and gave traders and analysts one place to work from instead of several.

The post-launch work mattered just as much. Bulk adjustments, refresh status and Saved Views all shipped from the research, and analysts’ informal feedback after launch was positive.

6 monthsProduct delivered for Canada & Mexico.
20,000+Page and report views since going live.
$1000’s savedBusiness cost saved was approx. $1000 per user, p/a
Reduced relianceOn third-party software with user-centric solution
Alpha Centauri running on a laptop