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PubNub's latest zero to one product is a real-time decisioning and analytics product that empowers product managers, analysts, and engineers to define custom real-time metrics, set up automated decision rules, and visualize results—without needing to pull the engineering team away from their ongoing projects. By leveraging PubNub’s robust data streams, it was designed to help organizations quickly deploy actionable insights in areas ranging from gaming and live events to IoT and logistics.
A real-time decisioning and analytics tool that allows product managers, analysts, and engineers to define custom metrics, set up automated decision rules, and visualize data instantly—all without requiring engineering support.
My role as Lead UX Designer was to define the design direction, establish consistent patterns across the platform, and simplify complex workflows for a more intuitive user experience.
The Challenge
PubNub’s platform was built for developers—offering powerful APIs for building real-time applications. However, non-technical users struggled to interact with real-time data streams without deep engineering support.
This limitation raised a critical question:
How might we enable collaboration between technical and non-technical users to effortlessly optimize their real-time applications?
A solution needed to:
• Empower non-technical users to define and manage real-time metrics without writing code.
• Provide seamless handoff between product managers, analysts, and engineers.
• Standardize interaction patterns across PubNub’s ecosystem.
We needed to create an intuitive experience for non-developers, without compromising the technical robustness expected by developers. This meant simplifying complex workflows, defining new interaction patterns, and creating consistent design patterns across the platform.
I led the design of three key modules that formed the foundation of this product:
📌 Business Objects – Defining Data Sources
•What it does: Allows users to pull in data streams and define metrics.
•UX Improvements: Simplified setup with step-by-step guidance for non-technical users.
📌 Decisions – Automating Real-Time Actions
•What it does: Enables users to create rules that trigger actions when conditions are met.
•UX Improvements: Designed an intuitive rule-builder interface that visually maps out conditions and actions.
📌 Dashboards – Visualizing Insights
•What it does: Provides real-time charts and analytics based on user-defined metrics.
•UX Improvements: Standardized cross-product components to ensure consistency across PubNub’s ecosystem.
✅ Key UX Wins:
•Created consistent design patterns across different modules, making navigation and usability seamless.
•Introduced no-code rule-building, reducing dependency on engineers.
•Designed scalable dashboard templates, allowing users to visualize key insights in seconds.
🚧 Challenge 1: Balancing Simplicity & Power
We needed to cater to both non-technical users and data-savvy engineers. Too much complexity would alienate non-technical users, while too much abstraction would frustrate engineers.
💡 Solution: I designed an interface that gradually reveals complexity—starting with simplified presets for new users while allowing advanced users to customize deeply.
🚧 Challenge 2: Defining New Interaction Patterns
With this product we introduced functionalities that did not exist in the current PubNub platform. I had to define and introduce new patterns while ensuring they could scale.
💡 Solution: I established reusable components and collaborated with the design system team to integrate them into PubNub’s broader design framework.
🚧 Challenge 3: Driving Adoption Across Diverse Use Cases
Customers had varying needs—from gaming analytics to IoT monitoring—making it challenging to design a one-size-fits-all solution.
💡 Solution: I facilitated co-creation workshops with customers to identify common workflows, which informed our modular approach. This ensured flexibility without overwhelming users with unnecessary complexity.
📈 Success in numbers:
• 30 customers actively testing during beta across multiple industries.
• 200+ customers using in production post-launch.
• 20+ customers explicitly requested scaling features to integrate with their core applications.
💡 Personal Growth & Leadership:
• Mentored a mid-level UX designer, fostering their growth while refining my leadership style.
• Developed a scalable design framework that influenced future PubNub products.
• Strengthened cross-functional collaboration with engineers, product managers, and customers.
🚀 Key Learnings:
• Thriving in ambiguity—breaking down problems into smallest solvable units helped drive progress.
• Balancing technical and non-technical needs required close collaboration with engineers and customers.
• Defining new patterns at scale is critical when shaping platform-wide design decisions.
