Iron Link Intel's OSINT operator terminal, rebuilt around one diagnosis. The data was never missing. The analyst was doing the reading. A federal operator then cleared a hard target in 11 minutes.
The Brand
Three days, four tools, one answer.
Founder-plus-ten team. I owned brand and product. Confidential engagement.
The Audit
I scored whether an operator could see what mattered. Same method before and after.
Why 47Before → after
Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
Dead-end charts. An operator could see a spike but never reach the incidents behind it.
Every chart drills into the incidents behind it. A spike is a door, not a terminus.
Flexibility and efficiency of use
A dense, undifferentiated table that was slow to scan under time pressure.
Triage stack with Critical / Elevated / Guarded badges, pinned rows, and facet filters.
Recognition rather than recall
Twelve top-level tabs with unlabeled icons forced operators to recall where each surface lived.
Collapsible icon-plus-label sidebar with status badges. Destinations are recognized, not memorized.
Nielsen heuristic evaluation on seven operator surfaces.
Monochrome
The board stays grey until a human is needed. Red is that decision.
Rebuilt to spec · synthetic data
The Terminal
"Geospatial Reconnaissance" agents instantly detected the threat and auto-routed the live feed.
Rebuilt to spec · synthetic data
Investigations and Reports live in the terminal, not as tabs inside Overview.
Rebuilt to spec · synthetic data
The Outcome: 11 minutes.
An identity used to take three days and four apps. I moved correlation into the agents and the recon apps onto one surface. A federal operator then cleared a hard target in 11 minutes. Copilot stays grey until a threshold needs a human.
The System
echo-lint fails the build when a raw hex reappears.
These swatches are the tokens the product ships.
Read live from the running stylesheet · --art-echo-* · checking 3 tokens…
Signal: meaning only, always paired with icon or label
Typefaces
System principles
Every colour is a named token in the product's contract file. Agents and the stylesheet read the same names. There is no second palette.
echo-lint reads token directives out of the source. A raw hex fails CI, including mine.
Written for humans and machines
Named in design-tokens.json, mirrored in echo-tokens.css, read live here.
Shipped engagement: audit, design system, operator terminal. I rebuilt this runnable case, the token migration, and the responsive range on synthetic data.
BRAND & INVESTIGATION TERMINAL
The "Architecture of Certainty" identity and the unified operator terminal: overview, identity finder, SOCMINT, threat monitor, dark web index, and evidence reports on one surface.
A single operational cycle (ingest, correlate, report) replacing a fragmented twelve-tab analyst stack.
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Charlotte, NC · Remote
Principal Product Designer
After 16+ years shipping product interfaces, I now design the surfaces where people and agents share a task: prompts, confidence, and the checkpoint where a human still decides.
