- Role
- Lead Product Design + Data Analyst
- Team
- Halfpipe Data Engineering
- Tools
- Cursor, Figma, Databricks, Adobe Analytics, Svelte, CSS, Podium Design Library
Overview
Context
The organization was moving from JSON-based analytics instrumentation toward Protobuf contracts—stronger governance and scalability, but harder for cross-functional teams to read than flat JSON.
Clickstream Hub bridges that gap: it makes nested event architecture explorable so product, analytics, QA, and engineering can align on the same definitions without parsing raw repos.
Challenge
What needed to change
Protobuf structures are modular and reusable, but nested definitions and inheritance are difficult to visualize. Raw documentation and GitHub-first workflows slowed adoption during a parallel transition away from legacy analytics tooling.
- Consumers struggled to interpret nested schemas and shared components
- Documentation was disconnected from how the API behaved in practice
- Teams needed experience-based views, not only file-based definitions
- Adoption friction threatened timelines for infrastructure and cost initiatives
Goals
Design principles
- 1. Make event contracts explorable by experience and surface—not only by file.
- 2. Surface global fields, action-level fields, and history in coherent views.
- 3. Reduce dependence on engineering to interpret schema structure for everyday questions.
- 4. Ship an internal tool that stays in parity as contracts evolve.
Chapter 1
Hub entry and navigation
The home experience orients users around the catalog of actions and surfaces—establishing a single starting point before drilling into event detail.
Chapter 2
Event-level view and global fields
Example: a cart-modified event with global field definitions surfaced alongside the event context—so teams see shared structure before diving into action-specific payloads.
Chapter 3
Action fields and lineage
Action-scoped fields and history views support validation and QA—showing what changed and which fields apply at the action level versus inherited layers.
Chapter 4
Documentation layer
A dedicated documentation surface ties the UI back to narrative expectations—so teams can cross-reference contract behavior without leaving the product.
Outcomes
Impact
- ↑ Centralized exploration of 269 unique user actions across 5 digital products
- ↓ Reduced reliance on raw GitHub proto files; increased transparency into event contracts
- ↑ Experience-based filtering and interactive event detail views for cross-functional teams
- ↑ Supported enterprise migration away from legacy analytics; adoption lever for cost-reduction
- ↑ AI-assisted prototyping (Cursor) to interrogate the API and accelerate design iteration
Clickstream Hub functions as both documentation and interface—helping teams build confidence in governed event architecture during a major platform transition.
Reflection
Closing thoughts
As organizations move toward strongly typed event contracts and cost-optimized analytics stacks, designers who can bridge UX, data architecture, and fast iteration become critical. Internal tools are behavior-change tools—and clarity in the contract layer is part of that change.