Belastingdienst

Dashboard

UX Design

Belastingdienst

Toeslagenaffaire - Operational Insights

2024 - 2025

UX & UI Lead

Dashboard

UX Design

Belasting-dienst

Toeslagenaffaire - Operational Insights

2024 - 2025

UX & UI Lead

The Uitvoeringsorganisatie Herstel Toeslagenaffaire needed operational and strategic insights products for its board and 12 operational teams. This project involved intense public and political scrutiny, and the speed of recovery for affected families depended directly on operational clarity.

Disclaimer: This project is under NDA, therefore no explicit or visual information is shared.

problem

What needed solving.

The recovery process involved many parallel workstreams, many of which tracking progress in their own way. Without a shared data model and a unified reporting layer, it was difficult to build a reliable picture of where the process stood, what was moving, and where attention was needed. Both the board and the operational teams needed sharper clarity, but on very different levels of detail.

constraints

What I was working with.

Existing tooling was fixed, there was very little room to change the underlying systems.

Weekly steerco sessions with little lead time, meaning insights needed to be ready under time pressure.

Sensitivity of the subject meant every visualisation choice carried political weight. Nothing could mislead or oversimplify.

Multiple stakeholder layers, each with different information needs and varying levels of data literacy.

A lack of clear data definitions meant competing insight products already existed, each showing a different version of the truth.

No standardized design process or visual guidelines existed, resulting in inconsistent visual outputs.

insight

What I realized.

"

The core problem wasn't a lack of data, but a lack of a shared language. Many parts of the organisation measured progress differently. The design work began by building consensus on what progress actually meant, and then making that consensus visible and trustworthy.

design intent

What we decided, and why.

01

Define a shared case lifecycle

Between the insights team and strategic and operation managers, we agreed on demarcated stages across all teams, so every insight product spoke the same language.

02

One primary view per team

Each operational team would get exactly what mattered to them, nothing more, nothing less.

03

Exception-based board view

Leadership didn't need summaries. They needed to know where things weren't moving and why.

04

Progressive disclosure

Team leads could drill from their steering overview all the way down to individual case level.

05

Sober, institutional visual language

Given the political weight of the project, the design intentionally avoided anything that could distract or mislead.

06

Build a team-wide design system

To address the inconsistency problem structurally, I co-developed a full data product design system covering typography, colour, and component standards for the entire insights team. A single source of truth that every designer, developer and analyst could reference, and that is, to the best of my knowledge, still in use today.

07

Establish a shared process framework

I developed a methodology document describing how the frontend team approaches visual data products end-to-end, including a UX Canvas and KPI Framework for capturing user information needs. This was delivered as a 4-hour training for the frontend team, and a condensed version was presented to the wider data team (engineers, analysts, and programmers) to improve cross-team understanding and collaboration.

08

Insights development and delivery

Using all the above principles, our frontend team developed, tested and implemented visual data products for the board and 12 operational teams and trained the users to optimally replace their previous work methods.

Outcome

What it left behind.

60%

reduction in parent file throughput time

50%

reduction in steerco insights development time

12

operational teams using the dashboards

30+

team members trained on the process framework

During my time on this project, through the combined efforts of our larger data team, overall parent file throughput time was reduced by 60%. Development time for steerco insights was cut by 50%. The dashboards we designed and developed were adopted as the primary steering and operational insights tools across all 12 teams.

Beyond the dashboards themselves, the design system I developed became the shared standard for all visual data products within the team and is, to the best of my knowledge, still in use today. The process methodology and UX Canvas were delivered as a 4-hour training to the frontend team, and a condensed version was presented to the wider data team to strengthen the working relationship between designers, data scientists and engineers.

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© 2026 Robin Gringhuis