My experience at
Designing for Impact in Sustainability
Work
During my internship at SustainLab, I contributed to the development of their Sustainability Management platform, that helps enterprises collect, report, organise, and extract insights from their ESG data to accelerate positive impact on their sustainability front.
The design team consisted of 3 people- Pauline(lead), Soe, and I. One week in, I was flung into the deep end of the pool with work that had real product impact. My architectural background and experience translating abstract concepts into detailed, buildable systems helped me adapt quickly, take ownership early, and grow more than I expected (thanks, Pauline!).
My primary focus during my time at SustainLab was the CSRD module on the platform, built to support a new EU law requiring companies to report on environmental and social impact. With 284 pages and over 1000 data points, it posed a major UX challenge for sustainability teams trying to make sense of it all. At SustainLab, I joined the team mid-build and I played a key role in shaping and evolving the experience.
We designed within ambiguity, often reworking user flows to accommodate regulatory changes, and making key UX decisions, transforming a chaotic, high-stakes requirement into a guided, usable tool that helped companies get CSRD-ready.
My key contributions:
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CSRD module- Optimised user flows and designed intuitive interfaces for the module, improving accessibility of compliance reporting for sustainability managers and data reporters; contributed to significant company growth, with the module playing a role in a 230% increase in overall performance.
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Core MVP feature- Designed core user flows for a core MVP feature, aligning with pre-defined user personas enabling seamless integration of complex organizational data into existing platform workflows and improving data management efficiency for users.
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UAT- Represented the design team in a company-wide User Acceptance Testing (UAT), advocating for user needs and ensuring final designs met functionality goals and user expectations.
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Dev Collaboration- Conducted interviews with developers to identify communication gaps, analysing pain points and designing an improved design handoff template in Figma to reduce design queries by ~40%
Learnings
This experience helped me grow quickly in a fast-paced environment. I got comfortable designing within ambiguity, strengthened my collaboration with cross-functional teams, and design with both user empathy and technical feasibility in mind. I also gained deep insight into sustainability metrics and real-world implementation of enterprise design systems.
While I cannot share the designs directly due to confidentiality, I encourage you to request a free demo on the SustainLab website to see the platform and experience the design first hand. :)
A glimpse of the CSRD module on the SustainLab platform.
(courtesy: www.sustainlab.co)
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