Enhancing the UX of data governance
An academic UX research project enhancing data management at SydBank
Sydbank approached to strengthen knowledge-sharing on its Alation data-catalog platform. Although Alation already stores thousands of tables, queries and articles, employees rely on hallway chats, Teams and email to solve everyday data questions. This siloed behaviour blocks reuse of high-quality assets, slows onboarding of new analysts and undermines Sydbank’s ambition to base decisions on a single, trusted source of data truth. Our challenge was to explore how lightweight social mechanisms could weave everyday collaboration directly into the catalogue without disrupting existing lineage or governance workflows
Key features
We designed a high-fidelity Figma prototype that layers targeted community features onto familiar workflowsThreads: a tag-driven, Slack-style discussion panel anchored to every table, query and article, letting users ask follow-up questions and mark answers as “Accepted” for future seekers. Curated Home Dashboard: widgets for Latest Threads, Popular Queries and Featured Articles surface active content the moment users log in, replacing the static catalog landing page.Clarified Rating UI: iconography shifts from ambiguous flags to positive/negative thumbs, colour-safe states and an inline tooltip explaining impact.Undo Toasts & Micro-animation: real-time feedback encourages experimentation while staying WCAG-AA compliant. Prototype flows were validated through unmoderated remote tests in Maze; heat-maps and task-completion logs guided micro-interaction refinements.
