Case study
From weeks of data center due diligence to hours
- Company
Interfaces are reconstructed to respect client confidentiality.
The context
Finding the right place to build a data center starts long before construction.
Before committing to a site, teams need to understand whether a location can actually support a data center — from power and water availability to environmental constraints, permitting, connectivity, constructibility, and more.
Civarea was created to bring that early-stage due diligence into one product.
The problem
Critical issues were often discovered too late and the data is scattered all over different systems.
Evaluating a potential site meant gathering information from many different sources and relying on lengthy expert analysis and expensive tools. Teams could spend weeks evaluating a location before uncovering a constraint significant enough to reconsider it.
The question was simple: Can we identify those risks earlier?
Why it was hard
Hundreds of data layers had to make sense in a single experience.
The data was already there, we just needed to grab it and present it in a meaningful way. The design challenge was deciding how to turn it into a usable product: what users needed to see first, how they would move through the assessment, how hundreds of data points could coexist on an interface, and how to reveal detail without overwhelming them.
My role
When I joined the project the Product Manager told me “Maria, we need to make this make sense”. My job was to turn the very first iteration of the app (that was designed and developed by engineers) into a product people could actually use.
I redesigned the experience from the ground up around the user’s decision-making process — rethinking navigation, information hierarchy, data visualization, and how users progressively move from a big picture into the smallest of details.
My focus was deciding how much information to show, when to show it, and what users needed to see.
The decisions that shaped the product
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Design around how users think
- Decision
- Structure the navigation around the user’s evaluation flow.
- Over
- Organizing the product around the underlying data and system structure.
The first iteration exposed information without a clear journey. I reframed the experience around the questions users naturally ask as they evaluate a site.
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Make hundreds of layers readable
- Decision
- Use map layers to progressively reveal different types of information.
- Over
- Showing all available data at once.
The challenge wasn’t access to data, but making a large amount of spatial information understandable on a single screen.
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Answer “so what?”
- Decision
- Turn findings into insights that explain their relevance and impact.
- Over
- Simply telling users what the system found.
Knowing that a risk exists isn’t enough. Users need to understand why it matters and what deserves further investigation.
The evolution
Information without structure
The first iteration had the data, but the experience was fragmented and difficult to navigate.
A product organized around the user
Navigation, hierarchy, and visualization were redesigned around how teams actually evaluate a site.
From data to insights
The experience evolved beyond showing what was found to explaining why it matters and what users should investigate next.
Outcome
From a collection of data to a product built around decisions.
I turned an early, fragmented interface into a structured site-evaluation experience — creating a clear navigation model, making hundreds of spatial layers easier to explore, and connecting findings to the context users need to decide what to investigate next.
Lessons learned
Information hierarchy matters.
When everything is important, nothing feels important. Clear hierarchy became essential to making hundreds of layers usable.
Trust needs an explanation.
For high-stakes decisions, showing a result isn’t enough. Users need to understand where it came from and why it matters.
Design for the decision, not the data.
The goal wasn’t to expose everything the system knew. It was to surface what users needed to decide what to do next.