Designing a data quality compliance tool for governments and airlines

The Challenge

Before this project, airlines and governments relied on fragmented dashboards and static reports to evaluate data compliance. These tools lacked transparency and failed to highlight the operational impact of poor-quality data, leading to friction between agencies and carriers when errors were detected at border crossings. The challenge was to design a clear, unified monitoring tool that could:
- Provide near real-time visibility into passenger data accuracy and compliance.
- Identify and categorise data anomalies (missing, invalid, duplicate fields).
- Present compliance trends and exceptions in a way that was interpretable by both technical and non-technical users.
- Integrate seamlessly with existing systems while maintaining strict security and data privacy standards.
The product needed to support global deployment and accommodate multilingual, multi-stakeholder environments, ensuring that every participating organisation could trust the validity and provenance of its data.

My Approach

I began with discovery workshops involving both airline data operations teams and government compliance officers to understand their workflows, reporting pain points, and governance responsibilities. From these insights, I defined user personas and mapped their data investigation journeys, identifying which technical metrics and operational compliance was critical to measure. I developed multiple visualisation concepts to test how users interpreted complex datasets, experimenting with scorecards, machine learning, anomaly clustering, and white list management to visualise data integrity at scale. Each iteration was tested with internal stakeholders and refined for clarity and accessibility. To support global adoption, I worked with development teams to design a responsive, modular layout that could scale across web and tablet devices and comply with international accessibility standards.

Solution

The delivered platform combined intuitive data visualisation with deep analytical capability:

• Compliance Dashboard: Presented a real-time summary of data accuracy, completeness, and transmission performance across all participating airlines.
• Issue Explorer: Enabled users to drill down into data issues by route, country, or partner system, with contextual insights explaining root causes.
• Model & Anomaly Analysis: Machine learning modules surfaced recurring data anomalies and visualised their downstream effects on border operations.
• Custom Reporting & Export Tools: Allowed users to generate evidence-based compliance reports for audits and government review.
• User Access Management: Provided secure, role-based control ensuring sensitive datasets were handled appropriately.

The design prioritised clarity, explainability, and consistency, allowing users to move from high-level insights to granular issue compliance and resolution with minimal friction..