Real-Time Intelligence
Microsoft
A core capability within Microsoft Fabric that processes live streaming data to deliver real-time insights within seconds across industries.
As a dashboard user monitoring real-time KPIs, I need to understand what a tile represents, so that I can make accurate, timely decisions without risking changes to production queries.
Personas:
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Data Engineers / Query Builders who create dashboards and write KQL.
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Data Consumers – operators, business users, and analysts who monitor live data.
Context Switching and Friction Across Personas
Upon joining the RTI team, the dashboard architecture forced both Data Engineers (Query Builders) and Data Consumers into workflows that didn’t align with their needs:
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Data Consumers struggled to understand tiles without entering the KQL editor
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Data Engineers faced unnecessary context switching when validating or exploring tiles, increasing the risk of accidental modifications to production queries.
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Both personas were constrained by an editor-centric experience, making dashboards feel more like editing tools than reliable, consumption-ready surfaces.
This friction impacted efficiency, confidence, and trust in the dashboards, highlighting the need for a design that served both consumption and editing workflows seamlessly.
The strategic redesign enabled data consumers to explore and interact with dashboards without writing a single line of KQL code, while still supporting engineers with full editing capabilities.
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Consumers could investigate tile data, perform aggregations, test hypotheses directly on the dashboard without needing to understand KQL.
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Users could switch from the consumption interface into editing mode whenever they needed to modify queries or fine-tune visualizations.
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Expose context without exposing KQL – Tile metadata, summarization, transformations, and query intent became visible in the consumption layer.
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Most interpretation tasks were completed within the dashboard, eliminating unnecessary trips into the editor.
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Engineers retained full editing power; consumers gained confidence and clarity without touching code.
This redesign transformed dashboards into a flexible, reliable monitoring surface, balancing low-code accessibility for consumers with advanced configurability for engineers.