UX/UI Design
Green Optimizer
Green Optimizer is a concept dashboard that helps application teams understand and optimize the environmental impact of their cloud workloads by bringing sustainability insights into existing operational workflows.
Desktop
Platform
UI Engineer, Software Devs, Software Architects
Tools
Collaboration
Figma
Context
As organizations increasingly prioritize sustainability initiatives, many application teams lack visibility into how infrastructure decisions contribute to carbon emissions. As sustainability became an increasingly important consideration for cloud operations, the product team explored opportunities to help organizations better understand and act on the environmental impact of their infrastructure.
Through this exploration, we identified an opportunity to make carbon emissions more visible and actionable within existing decision-making workflows.
Goals
Make the sustainability impact of cloud workloads visible and measurable.
Help teams balance carbon reduction goals with cost and operational constraints.
Enable application owners and engineers to identify opportunities for optimization and informed decision-making.
Personas
Application Owner
Sets sustainability goals and monitors performance across applications and teams.
Goals
Establish carbon reduction targets and thresholds
Monitor sustainability performance at a portfolio level
Understand progress toward organizational initiatives
Needs
High-level visibility into emissions trends
Reporting and benchmarking capabilities
Confidence that teams are acting on optimization opportunities
DevOps/SRE Engineer (Primary)
Investigates infrastructure issues and executes optimization efforts.
Goals
Identify workloads contributing to emissions
Evaluate tradeoffs between sustainability, cost, and performance
Implement changes that reduce environmental impact without compromising reliability
Pain Points
Actionable recommendations
Workload-level insights and analysis
Tools that integrate sustainability into existing operational workflows
Personas were synthesized from ongoing product discovery and domain exploration conducted by the team to represent the primary users involved in sustainability decision-making and infrastructure optimization.
Design Requirements
Historical Visibility
Provide historical sustainability metrics across workloads and infrastructure.
DevOps/SRE engineers need visibility into how emissions change over time to identify high-impact workloads, establish baselines, and monitor the effectiveness of optimization efforts.
Forecasting and Planning
Provide forecasting capabilities that model the sustainability impact of potential infrastructure decisions.
DevOps/SRE engineers frequently balance sustainability goals against cost, performance, and reliability requirements. Forecasting enables them to evaluate tradeoffs and make informed decisions before implementing changes.
Optimization Guidance
Provide actionable recommendations and optimization opportunities within existing operational workflows.
Sustainability data alone does not drive action. DevOps/SRE engineers need clear, prioritized guidance that translates emissions insights into concrete opportunities for reducing environmental impact without compromising system performance.
Prioritize Action
Design problem
DevOps/SRE engineers need to quickly understand where they should focus their attention. A dashboard with lots of sustainability data can easily become a monitoring tool without helping users decide what to do.
Design principle
Surface the most important actions and opportunities first.
Outcome
Rather than presenting emissions as a collection of metrics, I designed the dashboard to help engineers identify where intervention could have the greatest impact. High-priority workloads and recommended actions are surfaced upfront, allowing users to move from monitoring to action without manually interpreting multiple data points.
limited for confidentiality
Designs
Make Tradeoffs Visible
Design problem
Sustainability decisions affect cost and operational performance.
Design principle
Give engineers the context they need to make informed sustainability decisions.
Outcome
Sustainability cannot be evaluated in isolation from operational requirements. I brought emissions, cost, and renewable energy metrics together at the workload level so engineers could understand the tradeoffs associated with potential optimization opportunities. I also introduced a geographic view to help engineers explore how regional differences in energy sources and availability could inform where workloads are deployed.
Move from Insight to Optimization
Design problem
Monitoring emissions doesn't automatically lead to behavior change.
Design principle
Turn sustainability insights into actionable optimization opportunities.
Outcome
Once engineers identify an opportunity, they need to understand the potential impact of taking action. I designed planning and forecasting tools to help users evaluate potential changes before implementation and understand their expected sustainability impact.
Reflection
As an innovation project, this prototype allowed the team to pitch to key sustainability stakeholders and organizational leadership the value of Green Optimizer. We hoped to integrate the Green Optimizer technology with other FSO platforms. Additionally, it allowed the team to discuss ideas for the frontend UI, considering technical limitations.
A key challenge in the design of Green Optimizer was how to present data and avoid information overload. Our approach was to provide flexibility: provide the ability to filter data to show exactly what the user needs, and display both summary and detailed views of data.