PRIVATE CONTENT
CenterPoint energy
Senior UX Designer
Responsive Web
6+ Months
The team consisted of 1 Senior Designer (myself), a Junior Designer, 1 Product Manager, 7 Developers, and 1 QA
Challenge
The existing proposal process was inconsistent and difficult to evaluate. Teams submitted Word documents or spreadsheets with varied information, and reviewers struggled to compare projects objectively. Leadership lacked a data-driven system to ensure investment decisions aligned with broader strategic goals. AIS needed a design overhaul to support structured input, fair scoring, and a scalable review process that wouldn’t disrupt the complex stakeholder environment.
AIS (Asset Investment Strategy) is a prioritization tool used internally at CenterPoint to evaluate and optimize large-scale project proposals across departments. Before this redesign, proposals were submitted inconsistently and reviewed manually, making it difficult for leadership to identify the highest-impact investments. I redesigned the experience to introduce structured templates, a proposal workflow, and scoring logic aligned to leadership goals. The result was a smarter, more transparent process that helped prioritize $100M+ in investment requests more effectively and fairly.
Research & Stakeholder Interviews:
We interviewed program managers and data leads to understand how project proposals were built and reviewed. We uncovered friction around prioritization and unclear scoring logic.
Workflow Mapping & Optimization Strategy:
We defined a user flow that started with project submission and ended in an optimization engine that weighed proposals based on leadership goals and value per dollar spent.
Wireframes & Interaction Design:
We designed wireframes for proposal creation, template selection, question editing, and score visibility. The flows supported grouping multiple projects and region-specific logic.
UI Design & Data Alignment:
The UI emphasized modularity and clarity, showing proposal status, scoring breakdowns, and district/district filtering. A color system highlighted top-value submissions.
Results & Reflection:
The new interface helped users submit complete proposals faster, ensured regional compliance, and improved visibility into how scoring decisions were made by the optimization engine.
I began with stakeholder interviews and internal product demos to understand where the process was breaking down. Everyone—from engineers to finance to strategy teams—had different workflows for submitting investment proposals. As a result, leadership couldn’t fairly weigh projects or confidently allocate funding.
I also reviewed past proposals, scoring frameworks, and internal documentation to understand how decisions were made and what inputs were valued most. From that, I worked closely with PMs to uncover key needs across three distinct user types: proposal submitters, template designers, and reviewers.
To support the complexity of AIS, I designed multiple parallel flows:
Template Creation Flow (used by strategy teams to define weighted questions and scoring logic)
Proposal Submission Flow (used by project managers to submit ideas for funding)
Review & Approval Flow (used by leadership to approve, deny, or score proposals)
Each flow was mapped with condition-based routing to ensure users only saw relevant sections. This helped reduce friction for new users while ensuring power users could complete complex submissions.
AIS had to do a lot—but I didn’t want users to feel overwhelmed. Wireframes were critical in defining a modular layout that could support complex input fields like decimals, justifications, and attachments, while still feeling simple and approachable.
Key wireframe decisions:
Split the proposal into tabbed sections (Details, Questions, Summary)
Made templates previewable during proposal creation to reduce errors
Prioritized scannability for reviewers who needed to compare dozens of proposals quickly
I validated the wireframes with internal stakeholders across strategy, engineering, and operations.
The visual system was kept clean and neutral, aligning with internal tooling already in use across CenterPoint. I used a card-based layout for questions and inputs, introduced visual indicators for required fields, and added tags for risk, improvement, or compliance-related categories.
New features included:
Drag-and-drop question builder in the template flow
Inline error handling and validation during proposal submission
Proposal status indicators and comment threads for review
Each screen was carefully designed for scalability, knowing that future iterations would expand functionality further.
The AIS redesign directly improved how project proposals were submitted, reviewed, and funded. Teams were able to align more closely with leadership goals, reduce submission errors, and create strategic groupings that were easier to evaluate. The platform is now the primary tool used across multiple business units to manage multi-billion dollar investments.
This project pushed me to design for scale, structure, and long-term impact. The most challenging aspect was creating a system flexible enough for a wide range of users — from finance to engineering — while keeping the UX clear and modular. I learned how to build tools that drive consistency, reduce ambiguity, and influence business decisions at the highest levels.
