Asset Layout Editor.
When One Size Doesn't Fit All
After the success of Workflow Designer, I was promoted to lead the Asset Pages Redesign project at Collibra. This was a much bigger challenge: how people discover and interact with data assets across the entire platform. Asset pages are central to how data professionals work in Collibra - they're where people go to understand what a dataset contains, who owns it, how it relates to other assets, and whether they can use it for their projects. But our existing asset pages were built with a one-size-fits-all approach that wasn't serving anyone well.
Here's what I discovered through user research: different organizations had completely different priorities when viewing data assets. A financial services company needed to see compliance and regulatory information prominently. A retail company cared most about data freshness and usage patterns. A healthcare organization prioritized data lineage and privacy classifications. Yet everyone was seeing the same generic asset page layout. Data teams were spending unnecessary time scrolling through irrelevant information to find what they actually needed. Worse, important information was often buried in sections that didn't match how teams actually thought about their data assets.
Problem statement.
Organizations needed asset pages that reflected their specific data governance priorities and team workflows, but were stuck with a generic layout that didn't match how any team actually worked with data assets.
Challenges.
My idea was to create a solution that would let organizations tailor asset pages to match their specific needs and workflows, while maintaining consistency and usability across the platform. The challenge had several dimensions:
Layout inflexibility - asset pages had a fixed structure that couldn't be adapted to different organizational needs
Information hierarchy mismatch - critical information for one organization was noise for another
User experience consistency - customization couldn't break the overall platform experience or confuse users
The solution needed to give organizations control over their asset pages while maintaining the platform's usability and performance.
Building the Asset Layout Editor
Created a Drag-and-Drop Asset Layout Editor
We designed a visual editor that let platform administrators customise asset page layouts using drag-and-drop functionality. The editor allowed them to choose which sections, widgets, attribute types, and relation types appeared on asset pages, and organise them into logical groupings that matched their team's mental models.
The key insight was making this layout-specific to asset type and assignment combinations. A "Customer Database" asset could have a different layout than a "Marketing Campaign" asset, and within the same asset type, different user roles could see layouts optimized for their needs
Implementation of publishing workflow for safe iteration
Rather than forcing administrators to make changes live immediately, we built a draft-and-publish system. Administrators could experiment with layouts, preview how they would look, and only publish when they were confident in the changes.
This drafting system was crucial for enterprise adoption - it meant administrators could safely iterate on layouts without accidentally breaking the experience for hundreds of users. Changes were automatically saved as drafts, and only became live when explicitly published.
Built smart content organization with the best practice guidance
The key innovation was introducing a flexible section and widget system that let administrators organize asset information in ways that matched their team's mental models. Instead of forcing users to work with predetermined content blocks, they could create custom sections and populate them with relevant widgets, attribute types, and relation types.
Administrators could create sections like "Compliance & Privacy," "Data Quality Metrics," or "Business Context" and then drag the appropriate attributes into each section. This meant a financial services company could group all regulatory information together, while a marketing team could prioritise usage statistics and campaign performance data.
The widget system was particularly powerful - specialized widgets like Privacy information could be placed exactly where teams expected to find them, with clear section names that made critical information immediately discoverable. This organizational flexibility meant that every asset type could be structured to match how different roles actually consumed data asset information.
Challenges and solutions on the journey.
Concurrent editing became a user experience issue - multiple administrators could work on the same layout simultaneously, potentially overwriting each other's changes. While we couldn't implement full collaborative editing in the initial version, we addressed this through clear communication about draft ownership and recommended coordination practices.
Balancing flexibility with usability was complex - we wanted to give administrators maximum customization power while preventing them from creating confusing or unusable layouts. The solution was building in best practice guidance and content organisation recommendations directly into the editor interface.
System content limitations required careful communication - certain out-of-the-box asset types included system-controlled content that couldn't be customized, which initially seemed like a constraint. However, this taught us that customization without boundaries often leads to poor user experiences. We designed the editor to clearly indicate what could and couldn't be edited, turning these limitations into helpful structure. The most successful customization tools provide flexibility within well-designed constraints - users need enough freedom to match their workflows while having guardrails that prevent them from creating confusing or unusable layouts.
Final product.
As a team, we built the Asset Layout Editor - a drag-and-drop customization tool that transformed how organizations could tailor their data asset pages. The editor worked seamlessly with the new asset page structure we designed: a table of contents on the left showing all customized sections, the main content area displaying the tailored information, and an "At a glance" sidebar on the right providing quick access to the most critical asset details. The editor integrated drafting and publishing workflows, allowing safe iteration before changes went live to hundreds of users. Platform administrators could finally create asset layouts that matched their team's specific workflows and priorities.
Outcome
Customer satisfaction improved from 46% to 74% - this dramatic improvement came from customers finally being able to see asset information organized the way they actually needed it.
Global rollout across thousands of daily users - we successfully deployed the new asset layout system without disrupting existing workflows, coordinating carefully with engineering and design teams to ensure smooth transitions.
Adoption by diverse organizations - different industries and team structures successfully customized their asset pages to match their specific data governance needs.
Additional technical details about the Asset Layout Editor functionality are available in Collibra's public documentation.