A Secure & Govern admin running daily remediation triage, sensitive content review, and link/folder cleanup. Wants to see his risk score, fix it, and keep storage costs down.

A dashboard that explains itself in one glance, lets him drill from any tile into the actual remediation queue, and remembers what he last cared about.

Communicate S&G value, enable remediation inside the dashboard, allow customization, and align with the new Egnyte UX. Drive adoption on Enterprise + Enterprise Lite.

Every design decision had to sell, function, and scale. The dashboard is a sales tool and a workspace.

Risk widgets that clicked but didn't function. Disconnected CTAs. Full-width widgets that ate the screen. A risk gauge styled like a weather forecast that looked clickable but wasn't.

No unified system, so every widget invented its own pattern. Fix the system, not the symptoms.

Every core widget was orphaned. No shared language, no consistent layout, no agreement on how a "score" or a "list" should look or behave.

Treat widgets like a library, not bespoke artwork. The library was Phase 1.

Critical content kept landing below the fold. Widgets sized themselves to the screen, not the data, so admins missed the most important risk metric every time they loaded the page.

Tighter widgets. Predictable above-the-fold zone. The most important answer first, every time.

Pendo heatmaps mapped exactly where admins clicked, hovered, and gave up. The weather-forecast risk gauge was the most-hovered, never-clicked element on the page.

If a widget looks interactive, it must be interactive. Anything else is a broken promise.

Daily users who lived inside S&G. They had workarounds for everything, which masked the system's real cost. Their feedback drove the priority order for the new framework.

Power users were masking the broken UX. Designing for them alone would have hidden the bigger problem.

Admins who logged in once, didn't see what to do, and never came back. The dashboard's first impression was costing the team retention on Lite plans.

The dashboard had to onboard, not just display. Empty states earned a real design pass.

Three workstreams ran in parallel: metrics on current usage (Pendo, Mixpanel, BigQuery), competitive teardown of four file-share platforms, and heuristic evaluation across WebUI, Desktop, and Mobile.

Without a deliverable named up front, the team would have spent the quarter on a literature review instead of a brief.

Naming the inputs and the outputs kept the team out of analysis paralysis.

Pendo, Mixpanel, and BigQuery agreed. Preview was the #1 surface on every measure that matters — unique users, page views, time on page. Where users uploaded, downloaded, and went looking for their important data.

It was getting workspace-level traffic with viewer-level investment.

The rank gave the team air cover to actually invest in the surface, not just maintain it.

Tracking the path users took after landing on Preview surfaced a tight loop. They bounced back to the file list, re-sorted, re-scrolled, and re-entered Preview — often within seconds.

Every glance at a file was a round-trip. Multiplied across 20,000 customer organizations, that's hours a day spent bouncing.

Preview wasn't being used as a viewer. It was being used as a workspace, and the round-trip was the bug.

Co-led with Ayesha and Rakesh. Tore down each competitor's preview model — quick preview, search-in-document, modal preview, edit-view focus — and lined them up against ours.

Hover preview. Keyboard shortcut. Reading mode. Modal preview. Table-stakes elsewhere, missing here.

The popover-or-modal pattern was an industry consensus we hadn't acted on.

Same teardown, mobile surface. Bookmarking placement, search-in-document, multi-bookmark collections, sensitive-content policy display, modal preview, image editing.

Modal preview and sticky in-document search were the patterns competitors leaned on. Both absent from ours.

The mobile spec needed to be drawn from the same well as desktop, not delivered as a downsized afterthought.

Heuristic evaluation surfaced five categories of largest problems. The right drawer was the through-line: tab order, content density, action placement, refresh behavior, and discoverability all pointed to it.

The drawer was treated as overflow space, not as a peer surface to the file list.

Fix the drawer's contract and the five issues collapse to one.

MS Office, Google Docs, RTF, PDF, video, non-previewable, malware-headed — each opened with a different toolbar, content tools, and footer. Same surface, seven flavors.

Engineers were maintaining seven preview shells when the user only needed one.

Standardizing the model became part of the brief — for users AND for the team building it.

Joe and Harsh ran the synthesis together. Eighteen actionable items, split into Immediate, Short term, and Long term — each tagged to the research finding it answered.

Without prioritization, the team would have spent the quarter triaging instead of building.

One immediate-priority line on this slide read: “Pre-context preview to an item with actions to important features from files / folders view: possibly a popover or modal view.” That line became Quick View.

Quick View, broken into five named regions. Header. Actions. File view. AI summary. Properties. Each region pinned to one owner and one behavior. The artifact went into engineering review with notes attached, so the spec and the build conversation lived on the same page.

The header inherits from every right-drawer feature, so no new chrome, just one component across the platform. The file viewer leans on the Apryse integration for parity across file types. The page switcher is a custom build. The properties block expands after three lines and varies by file type.

One spec the team built from. Header reused. Apryse runs the viewer. The page switcher built once, used everywhere. AI summary as a power to quickly understand and then an opportunity to use deeper conversational AI.

Mapping every action a selected file could hold in the right drawer. The Egnyte Copilot panel for AI assistance, with suggested jobs and an open prompt. Edit and Share drop-downs for familiar existing menu habits. A right-rail of tabs for Ask, Comments, Workflows, Details, File insights, Metadata tags, and Help. Every tab labeled on hover so the icon-only rail stopped being a guessing game.

Three kinds of panels, one selected file. The Copilot panel as a contextual AI helper. Edit and Share menus listing every editor and every contextual path the file could take. Tooltips on every rail icon so first-time users could find their way without clicking first.

Copilot, Ask, Comments, Workflows, Details, File insights, Metadata tags, Help. All as right-drawer tabs. Edit and Share kept as inline dropdowns. Tooltips on every rail icon so the drawer explains itself.