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Pedro de Albuquerque — Quotidiano Studio
Selected work / CARTO · 2022–23

One design system for a platform that runs on maps and APIs

Leading design at a geospatial analytics platform — rebuilding its design system and designing for analysts who work with millions of rows.

Client

CARTO

Role

Head of Design

Team

Product designers, engineering, product, professional services

Scope

Design system, data management, connections and site selection

200→45components, rebuilt into a core set
83%adoption across product, services and marketing
2×faster time-to-market for new features
−60%interface inconsistencies
CARTO — One design system for a platform that runs on maps and APIs

Context

CARTO is a cloud-native platform for spatial analysis. Everything in it — maps, tables, analyses — is loaded through API calls against the customer’s data warehouse. Its users are data analysts, developers and business teams, often in the same company, with very different tolerance for complexity.

When I joined, the interface had grown faster than its foundations: more than 200 components, many solving the same problem in slightly different ways.

Rebuilding the system

I led the design system rebuild, from 200+ components to 45 core ones, and set up the structure to keep it healthy:

  • A Design System Council with design, engineering and product, so decisions were shared rather than imposed.
  • A component lifecycle — proposal, validation, deprecation — so the library could change without breaking teams.
  • Documentation and usage guides written for designers and developers alike.

Adoption reached 83% across product, professional services and marketing, new features shipped twice as fast, and interface inconsistencies dropped by 60%.

Connections screen listing BigQuery, Snowflake, PostgreSQL and Databricks connections
Connections — every data source in one place, built on the new system

Designing for data people

Direct work on the product kept the system honest. Two examples:

Direct access to the CARTO Data Warehouse

Customers needed to reach their CARTO-hosted BigQuery data from their own tools. I designed the flow to grant, verify and revoke access from the Connections screen, including the edge cases — a wrong account, a disconnection — that usually get left out.

Get access dialog with an error on the Google account field
Getting access, with the error state
Confirmation dialog to disconnect access
Revoking access, confirmed

Basic data management in the Data Explorer

Analysts needed to rename columns, change data types and delete fields without leaving the platform. We tested the table with 300 and 600 columns to make sure the interaction held at real scale, not just in a tidy mock-up.

Edit column dialog in the Data Explorer
Editing a column in place
Data table scrolled across 600 columns
Stress test — 600 columns
Site selection map with a whitespace analysis panel
CARTO for Site Selection — whitespace analysis on the map