Hurricane Helene spending dashboard
Serving the North Carolina State Auditor's Office, I led design for a contract team hired to redesign the Hurricane Helene finance dashboards. This project was intended to set the bar for all other incoming pages and dashboards from the Auditor's Office while also achieving a newly mandated level of ADA compliance.
For my part, I led both UX and data visualization, working closely with analysts, engineers and an accessibility expert to create a scalable design system and elevate future iterations of the site.
01 Problem
The North Carolina State Auditor’s Office needed to redesign and migrate its Hurricane Helene recovery spending experience into a clearer, more accessible public-facing dashboard. The audience ranged from residents with limited technical literacy to journalists, government leaders and analysts who needed more detailed, verifiable financial information.
The project also had to establish a stronger standard for future Auditor’s Office dashboards while working within the constraints of WordPress and embedded Power BI visualizations. Accessibility, transparency, consistency and scalability all had to be considered from the start so the work could function as a foundation for a broader public data ecosystem.
02 Approach
I led UX and data visualization, working closely with analysts, engineers and an accessibility expert. I developed personas, mapped user journeys and used those findings to shape the information architecture around the needs of residents, media, leadership and internal stakeholders with different levels of technical ability and different goals for the data.
03 Solution
The resulting experience organizes complex recovery spending data into a clearer narrative, beginning with high-level spending totals and recovery progress before moving into agency spending, funding sources, trends and more detailed analysis. The interface combines KPI cards, rankings, directly labeled charts, explanatory content and multiple data views to support both quick scanning and deeper investigation.
The work also produced a reusable design framework for future Auditor’s Office dashboards, including shared typography, components, interaction patterns, accessibility standards and data visualization conventions. Rather than solving only for the Hurricane Helene dashboard, the project created a scalable foundation for a more consistent and accessible OSA data ecosystem.
Process
Outcome
The project established a scalable foundation for how the State Auditor’s Office communicates complex public data. The new system transformed dense financial information into clearer, more accessible experiences while introducing reusable standards for dashboard structure, data visualization, interaction and accessibility. Beyond the Hurricane Helene recovery dashboard, the framework was designed to extend across future OSA tools and reporting experiences, giving stakeholders and developers a shared system for building more consistent, transparent and understandable public-facing data products.