Quattro
CONTEXT
Enhancing Quattro with Proactive Alerting
Building a robust Monitoring Dashboard was a crucial step in modernizing Quattro*, but visibility alone isn't enough—users need timely, actionable alerts to optimize campaigns effectively. Without proactive notifications, issues go unnoticed until it's too late, leading to inefficiencies and missed opportunities.
*Quattro is a digital advertising platform modernization initiative aimed at enhancing efficiency, scalability, and self-service capabilities. Click here ↗ to learn more about the project background.
PROBLEM
An Alerting System That Brings More Noise Than Clarity
Quattro’s legacy Alerting System was intended to help users optimize campaign performance by notifying them of critical issues. However, instead of providing timely, relevant, and actionable insights, it became a major source of frustration and inefficiency.
Key Issues with the Existing Alerting System:
Overwhelming & Irrelevant Alerts
Lack of Prioritization & Actionability
Slow & Inefficient UI
Scattered & Inconsistent Notification Channels
Rigid Rules & Lack of Adaptability
User Frustration & Business Impact
Instead of improving efficiency, the existing system slowed users down and failed to provide real value in campaign optimization. Professional Services teams were forced to rely on manual checks, increasing workload and reducing operational efficiency. Without a way to filter out noise and surface key insights, users struggled to take proactive steps, ultimately impacting campaign performance and business outcomes.
The Need for Change
To truly support users in optimizing campaigns, the Alerting System needed a complete overhaul—one that delivers timely, relevant, and prioritized alerts while integrating seamlessly into user workflows. The goal was clear: replace noise with intelligence and turn alerts into actionable insights that drive faster, smarter decision-making.
Finding Clarity in Complexity
Rethinking the Purpose of Alerts
When I first approached the Quattro Alerting System, I was faced with a complex ecosystem of legacy infrastructure, overwhelming data, and scattered notifications. The natural instinct for many stakeholders was to focus on fixing the alert mechanism itself—adjusting thresholds, refining rules, or improving the UI. But I quickly realized that this approach was leading us into a dead end.
💡 What do users truly need?
It became clear that users don’t need more or better alerts—they need timely, clear insights into which campaigns or line items are underperforming. Their ultimate goal is to identify and resolve issues efficiently, not to sift through a flood of notifications. Alerts are merely a tool to facilitate this process, not the end goal itself.
This shift in perspective completely reframed how I approached the problem in the following steps.
Turning Insights into Action
Research, Collaboration, and Early Concepts
With the realization that users need clear, timely insights into underperforming campaigns and line items, I collaborated with our researcher to conduct extensive user interviews. Through multiple rounds of discussions, we gathered in-depth insights into how users interact with alerts, the pain points they experience, and what truly enables them to take effective action.
Simultaneously, I began structuring an ideal alerting information architecture and workflow, focusing on simplifying the signal-to-noise ratio and ensuring that the system surfaces only the most relevant insights.
To ensure feasibility and alignment with system capabilities, I partnered with the Project Manager to lead cross-functional discussions with the backend data engineering team, focusing on:
These discussions informed the Phase One scope, allowing us to prioritize a set of high-impact alert types that would drive meaningful improvements in user efficiency.
Embedding Alerts into the Monitoring Workflow
One of the key design solutions I proposed was seamlessly embedding alerts within the monitoring interface, ensuring users could identify and act on issues directly within their workflow, without the need for unnecessary context-switching.
With this strategy in place, I began crafting low-fidelity wireframes, iterating on them through continuous user feedback to refine the experience.
This iterative process laid the foundation for a more intelligent, user-centric alerting system—one that prioritizes clarity over noise, enhances decision-making, and improves operational efficiency. Instead of navigating across multiple systems to locate relevant alerts, users can now immediately identify underperforming items while monitoring their campaigns and review prioritized alerts in real-time.
Showcasing the Design
Key Features of the Enhanced Alerting System
To create a seamless, intuitive, and actionable alerting experience, I introduced several key design enhancements that integrate alerts directly into the monitoring workflow, allowing users to identify and address performance issues efficiently and all in one place.
Personalized Alert Filtering on Login
Upon logging into the monitoring system, users are automatically presented with alerts and campaigns relevant to their accounts, ensuring they can focus on what matters most without manual filtering.
Alert Visibility in the Monitoring Table
A dedicated alert column in the monitoring table displays the number of active alerts for each campaign or line item.
Users can sort this column to quickly identify which items have the highest number of alerts or the most urgent issues.
Visual Indicators for KPI Performance in Sparkline Charts
Color-coded alerts are integrated within the monitoring interface, aligning with KPI performance metrics to help users instantly identify performance issue and correlate alerts with real-time data.
In sparkline charts, hovering over data points highlights underperforming KPIs, allowing users to quickly spot issues directly within the dashboard without switching to other tools for further investigation.
Quick-Check Side Panel for Alerts
A collapsible side panel provides a real-time view of alerts, categorized by time and priority for each campaign or line item.
Instead of sending repeated alerts every hour for persistent KPI underperformance, the system now displays the first timestamp and duration of the issue, helping users assess severity without unnecessary noise.
Alerts Integrated Within Performance Charts
If an alert has been triggered within the past 24 hours, it is visually marked on performance charts.
Users can hover over these markers to view detailed alert information, making it easy to correlate alerts with performance fluctuations
Group Snooze Functionality
Users can now snooze alerts in groups, which is particularly useful when data ingestion issues cause temporary inaccuracies. This allows users to quickly silence non-actionable alerts.
The Future of the Insight-Driven Alert System
Measurable Impact from Phase One
The integration of the Insight-Driven Alert System with the Monitoring Dashboard has delivered significant efficiency gains and business impact:
30% improvement in operational efficiency
18% margin improvement
Preventing $5 million in potential revenue loss
By transforming alerts into actionable insights, phase one established a more intelligent, efficient, and user-centric system—helping teams focus on what matters most.
The Focus for Phase Two
Building on the success of phase one, the next iteration of the Insight-Driven Alert System will introduce advanced features to further enhance customization, intelligence, and usability:
User-Defined Alert Thresholds – Allowing users to configure alert thresholds per Alert Type, Campaign, and Placement Type, providing greater flexibility and relevance.
Smarter Alert Logic – Refining alert triggers to be more context-aware, incorporating relative thresholds (e.g. detecting anomalies like "2 out of 5" being significant, whereas "2 out of 1000" is not).
Evolving Alerts into a Daily Action Plan – Exploring the potential to transform alerts into a task-tracking tool, replacing the Snooze feature with an advanced status checker to help users manage alerts as part of their daily workflow.
By continuing to refine and enhance the system, we aim to create a more intuitive, intelligent, and proactive alerting experience—one that empowers users, safeguards revenue, and drives sustained business growth.
