Case Study01 — 06




Finout — Cloud Cost
Management Dashboard



A product that regrouped invoices scattered across multiple cloud accounts by team, letting you understand who spends what — all on a single screen.







Role


Lead Product Designer



Timeline


2023.09 — 2024.06



Team


1 PM · 2 Designers · 6 Engineers



Platform


Web











An off-white workspace symbolizing the Finout project


Cover — Capturing the moment team-level cost reports take on physical form as paper objects.










Overview


— Defining the Problem

"Why is the bill so high this month?" Every month the finance team merged 12 cloud accounts into a spreadsheet — and it took three days to find the answer.




Invoices only broke down by service, region, and resource — but what the organization always wanted to know was which team, on which project, spent it. Our first goal was to close the gap between the technical billing structure and the language of the organization. Untagged resources, duplicate tallies across accounts, and the absence of budget-overrun alerts — these three issues repeatedly eroded trust.










Process



Sharpening the Resolution in Three Steps









01



Research


Interviewing 14 people across three roles — finance, engineering, and leadership — we found each spoke about "cost" in an entirely different language. Before putting anything on screen, we agreed on a shared vocabulary.

Interview notes and an affinity diagram


We grouped recurring phrases from 14 interviews into an affinity map.









Information architecture laid out as cards


We validated the three-tier hierarchy — account → team → project — through card sorting.
02



Information Architecture


We reorganized around organizational units instead of billing units. Untagged resources were explicitly surfaced as "Unclassified," designed so hidden costs would never stay silent.









03



Visual System


The more numbers on a screen, the fewer colors we used. Over a neutral grayscale, we reserved a single accent color for budget-overrun signals, so the eye goes straight to the risk.

A device showing the neutral-toned visual system


On a restrained gray palette, the accent color appears only for overrun states.











Outcome — Six Months After Launch






+38%



Onboarding Completion



−24%



Support Tickets



2.1×



Dashboard Time Spent












Reflection




"The biggest leap didn't come from a new feature, but from renaming the numbers in the organization's own language. Before design was about drawing screens, it was about agreeing on what to call what."




— Lee Min-ha, Lead Product Designer




















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