Schiphol
Schiphol: from scattered data to a grip on thousands of assets
How reliability engineers and service managers at Schiphol got a dashboard that lets them stay ahead of malfunctions instead of chasing them.
For two years I worked as an enterprise UX designer and researcher in Schiphol's Asset Insights team. I mapped the daily practice of reliability engineers, service managers and technical experts, embedded a UX process in a data team without a design tradition, and translated raw asset data into a dashboard that teams use to monitor performance, maintenance and contractor compliance. When the product owner fell ill long-term, the team covered that role for over a year and I picked up a large part of the stakeholder management.
The problem
Schiphol manages an enormous infrastructure: escalators, elevators, passenger bridges, climate installations. Day-to-day maintenance sits with main contractors, but visibility on how assets were performing was scattered across systems and supplier reports. How often does something fail? How long do repairs take? Are contractors keeping their maintenance agreements? Nobody could see that in one place.
The result: reactive management, higher costs and malfunctions that touched the passenger experience. In the users’ own words: “There isn’t one main place to keep track of how assets are doing” and “it’s hard to see if contractors are following their maintenance agreements.”
My role
As a UX team of one within the Asset Insights team, I was responsible for research, design and the strategic choices around the Asset Insights Dashboard. I worked alongside a product owner, scrum master, business analyst and two developers, and was also part of the Schiphol UX Guild with designers and researchers embedded in other teams.
The process
First the daily practice, then the dashboard
I did not start with screens but with people: in-depth interviews with reliability engineers, service managers, managers and technical experts, spread across the Airside and Terminal clusters and different areas and asset groups. I translated those insights into professional personas, work journeys and job stories. One example: “When I report on the performance of assets, I want to provide an accurate representation of reliability and availability, so that management can make informed decisions regarding investments and priorities.”
Those job stories became the shared reference point for the whole team. I traced every epic and user story in the backlog back to a concrete user need, so the team never built functionality just because the data happened to allow it.
Designing within the limits of the data landscape
The availability and quality of the data was a structural obstacle: inconsistent, incomplete and spread across sources. Instead of designing for an ideal data world, I designed together with the data analysts: every dashboard element was tested against what the data could actually support. Whatever could not be shown reliably, we deliberately left out.
Validating with the people who have to work with it
From lo-fi wireframes to interactive Figma prototypes: every report was tested with the engineers and service managers themselves. Where opinions clashed, I put design variants side by side in A/B tests. That way the dashboard evolved iteratively with what users turned out to need, not with what stakeholders had assumed up front.
Carrying on when the product owner fell ill
Due to the product owner’s long-term illness, the team covered that role for more than a year. I picked up a large part of the stakeholder management: managing expectations towards business stakeholders and contractors, and keeping the project on course. Exactly the kind of situation where a self-steering freelancer proves their value.
The solution
The Asset Insights Dashboard brings scattered data together in a central KPI overview: availability, reliability (MTBF), maintainability (MTTR), condition and compliance, broken down by area, discipline and period. Underneath sit in-depth reports, from availability analysis and root cause analysis to climate analysis per pier.
Results
The biggest hurdle was not the design but the adoption: data-literate stakeholders had their own Splunk reports, others leaned on the main contractors’ reporting. By validating and rolling out the dashboard report by report with the target group itself, usage gradually shifted towards a shared source of truth.
The dashboard led to faster decision-making around malfunctions, lower maintenance costs through shorter repair times and fewer operational disruptions for passengers.
What I take away
With enterprise dashboards the real work sits below the waterline: the data quality, the work habits and the trust of experts who have had their own way of working for years. A dashboard does not replace Excel or Splunk because it looks better, but because users demonstrably make better decisions faster with it.
What the client says
“It's a pleasure to work with Roxanne, and I can easily recommend her to anyone who is looking for an all-round UX designer to help tackle complex problems and deliver simple and elegant solutions. Roxanne is an all-in-one UX designer, she supported one of our teams at Schiphol from concept and ideation phases all the way through delivery. She is self-steering, has a "let's go" attitude and a pragmatic approach to her work. The more complex the problem, the more passionate she gets.”
“Roxanne played a pivotal role in helping Schiphol elevate the passenger experience through data-driven solutions. She listened to stakeholder needs, challenged their perspectives, and transformed them into inspiring mockups and intuitive dashboards.”