Halo
Pulling mTab's decision intelligence platform into one coherent product
Overview
Halo is mTab's decision intelligence platform. It brings together insights tools, market research reports and data from providers like J.D. Power, Kantar and Ipsos, so customers can make decisions based on something more solid than a hunch. More than 1,500 brands use mTab, including Ford, Toyota, Hyundai, Jaguar Land Rover, Disney, Netflix, ESPN and Paramount.
As Head of Design I ran the design team and the whole product design process, often acting as product owner too.
Challenge
Before Halo, mTab's products were scattered: modules built separately over the years, with inconsistent patterns and no shared design language. Researchers, analysts and decision-makers had to move between disconnected interfaces every day. We needed one platform, without breaking the way people already worked.
My role
I was both designer and manager here, leading the team and working closely with Product. We started with the most fundamental question: how do people enter and navigate a platform made of separate applications?
The answer was a landing page: a hub that gives people one place to start and a clear route to every module, instead of dropping them straight into individual tools.
The second problem was structural. Work created in Reports, Flows, Models and mTab Classic was scattered and hard to find, so we built a shared content layer that gathers it in one place, whichever module produced it.
We then reframed the existing modules as editors, launched either from Halo or straight from a piece of content.
We also moved everyone into a single admin panel, and settled on one notifications system and easy-to-find documentation.
Rewrite, upgrade or retire
Not every module deserved the same treatment, so each was judged on usage and technical debt. Reports was heavily used but had outgrown its foundations, so it's being rewritten from scratch as the next generation of Reports.
The custom data visualisations are being upgraded gradually, and most are already available to selected customers. Discover and Stories, Tables and Marketplace were retired, with Discover's content migrated into Halo.
Retiring a module is never free, because it means moving people off something they know. But keeping every module alive would have left Halo as the same patchwork it was meant to replace.
Outcome
Halo turned a set of disconnected tools into something that feels like one product, with one place to start and one way to find your content. The editor rewrites are modernising the platform gradually, without pulling the rug out from under anyone.
Halo AI
Halo AI is the assistant built into Halo's editors, already working in Flows and Reports. You describe a change in plain language and it applies it across whatever you have open, like updating a footnote or a wave reference across 40 slides.
Trust shaped the design from the start. Halo AI works through Halo Models, the governed data layer, acts only with the signed-in user's permissions, and every change it makes can be undone.
What's next
We're adding features and moving users off the older parts of the system, so eventually everything lives in one place. Halo Flows, Halo Pulse and the next generation of Reports build on that foundation.
