Global Navigation &
Panel Wayfinding.
Expanding panels in a dense analytical interface were causing the page to jump — losing spatial context for power users who relied on positional memory to work efficiently. I redesigned the panel expansion behavior to preserve anchor context, and proposed user-customizable panel ordering to give analysts control over their own workspace.
The page was losing its place every time a user opened something.
Dense analytical interfaces depend on spatial memory. Power users — analysts moving through multiple panels in a session — build a mental map of where information lives. When expanding a panel caused the page to jump and re-anchor, that mental map broke. Users lost their place, had to reorient, and lost efficiency on every panel interaction.
This wasn't a catastrophic failure. It was a persistent low-level friction that compounded for heavy users — the exact people whose productivity the platform needed to protect.
Preserve position. Give users control.
The core problem was that panel expansion was treating the expanded panel as the new reference point and re-anchoring the page around it. The fix required changing the expansion behavior to preserve the user's current scroll position rather than jumping to the expanded element.
Beyond the anchor preservation fix, I proposed user-customizable panel ordering — giving analysts direct control over the layout of their workspace. This addressed the underlying cause of some of the jump behavior (panels appearing in an order that didn't match analyst workflow) and gave power users the agency to optimize for their own working patterns.