Turning Complex Acquisition Data into an Effortless Client Experience 

Hours of Prep, Slide Decks 80-100 Slides Long, and Incomprehensible Data

Ed Hodges in PGS is responsible for delivering the scoped and contracted data quality to the clients. The challenge he had was that one part of the technical equipment was difficult to monitor in terms of it’s performance. Ed and his team found it difficult and time consuming to explain to the client why and how we were meeting the standards we had agreed on.

The data sat in systems that were hard to access and even harder to interpret, which meant Ed’s team spent hours manually reconstructing the story for the client. They were needing to create slide decks of 80-100 slides long to explain every second of data acquisition. More questions were being asked and more meetings were being held than were necessary, for the client to feel confident in the data. And there was a large time burden in preparing for these meetings with lengthy copy and paste exercises to be able to present the data in a digestible way.

The design-sprint format gave us a controlled, fast-paced way to align experts, test assumptions, and validate a solution in days rather than months.

By the end of day two we had a completely new perspective, a concrete storyboard blueprint, and were ready to build a working prototype. On the third day the UX designer built the prototype in Figma while a small team worked on booking meetings with users. On the fourth day we tested the prototype with five colleagues that represented either roles close to the client or that they were clients previously.

Wrapping up the sprint with our conclusions we celebrated a huge progress and concrete actions for iterating on the prototype. User feedback confirmed the approach was dramatically clearer and more intuitive than the existing slide-based workflow. We had a backlog of improvement tweaks for the UX designer and a validated prototype ready for backend development.

A New Way to See the Data

The prototype itself was a dramatically different solution to the current way of working. One of the key ideas was to use a timeline player functionality. This meant that Ed and his team would be able to share this one interface view with the client and simply skip through, like a YouTube video, pausing to investigate, rather than needing to create 80-100 slides. There would be no copy and pasting, and no need for all that time sorting through and building the case every time.

Real-World Results

The prototype went into production shortly after the sprint. Developed in React and connected to live data, it transformed the reporting process into a single, interactive timeline the team and client can explore together. No more 100-slide decks, no more copy-and-paste marathons. It has saved Ed’s team significant time and shifted conversations from explanation to collaboration, strengthening trust and enabling more meaningful, pragmatic decision-making.