Ready to design your Process Intelligence app? Check out these best practices first

But for AI to create real value for your business, it must first understand how the processes within that business run. In other words, it needs Process Intelligence (PI). The same report reveals 89% of business leaders feel it’s crucial AI has the context of how their business runs if it’s to be effectively deployed. So, as we so often say at Celonis, there’s no AI without PI.

Highly customized apps and dashboards are critical for understanding and acting on the Process Intelligence that will make AI work for your business. Our low-code development environment – Celonis Studio – lets you build, test, publish, and share Process Intelligence apps that streamline daily workflows. With Studio you don’t just get access to the technology, you also become part of a builder community where extensive knowledge and experience in creating Process Intelligence apps is shared.

Having supported analysts in creating thousands of apps over the years, our team sat down to discuss some best practices for designing Process Intelligence apps that users can navigate intuitively. Here are our top tips to get you started.

1. Begin with context

Process intelligence apps aim to provide information quickly and efficiently, empowering users to make informed decisions based on valuable insights. Before you start to design your app, you’ll first need to consider its purpose and the context in which it’s going to be used.

Some key considerations include:

• The purpose: Outline the high-level concept for the app and the problem it’s intended to solve. Think about how that problem is solved today and how this can be improved.
• The audience: Who is the main intended user for the app? What do they already know about the data presented? Will they need to just visualize it or also analyze it?
• The data: What data must be presented in the app to inform decision making? What are the most important insights your users need to make specific decisions?
• The usage: Think about where and how users will interact with the app. Will they be using mobile devices or large monitors? Will they have touch screens? How often will they need to access it?

Keep referring back to this context as you design and build your app to make sure you stay on track. You can use this app building framework as a starting point.

"The best app builders don’t start with data, they start with understanding,” said Carolin Ullrich, Senior Product Manager, Components and Studio at Celonis. “Before opening Celonis Studio, they talk to users, shadow their workflows, and deeply explore the problem. This clarity ensures their Process Intelligence apps drive meaningful impact.”

2. Simplify your data

To ensure your app delivers real value as a decision-making tool, you should visualize your data in a clear and user-friendly way. This could involve:

• Using color, size, and placement to create clear hierarchies that guide the user’s attention to the most relevant data points. For example, using the color red for numbers that are below the target.
• Visually grouping related data points, perhaps using containers, so users can see relationships within the data.
• Making strategic use of white space to improve readability by separating different sections and elements.
• Offering additional details in tooltips or pop-ups so users can explore the data in greater depth without cluttering the main view.
• Ensuring graphs and charts have simple labels and legends, without complex terminology or jargon, to explain the data points.

By visualizing your data in this way, users of your app can more easily understand complex data, identify key insights, and make informed decisions.

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Rodrigo Costa, Lead Consultant for EMEA Services at Celonis, has some sage advice for keeping your visualizations clutter free:

"Everyone agrees on keeping PI apps simple, until the first ‘just add one more thing’ request. Instead of letting complexity creep in, have a conversation. Understand the real need behind the request and explore smarter ways to integrate it, like interactive elements, a separate tab, or a tailored view for a specific audience. Simplicity isn’t about saying no; it’s about adding with intention."

3. Use color strategically

The colors chosen for your app design aren’t just a way of bringing your brand to life, they're also a critical factor in determining the usability of an app. The right color choices contribute to clarity and readability, especially for data visualizations, and can aid interpretation by drawing attention to critical information.

To deliver a cohesive visual experience you should consider color harmony. This often means starting with your brand colors and then using complementary colors for emphasis, or analogous colors for a more harmonious feel. Multiple shades of your brand colors can be used to show continuous data or emphasize trends and patterns. Studio Color themes let you manage consistent colors across your dashboards, ensuring a unified color scheme is used across the organization.

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Next, you’ll need to make meaningful color choices, ensuring each color serves a specific purpose in relation to the data. Colors can be used to differentiate categories, track changes over time, or visually encode values, as well as to draw attention to key data points or trends. These choices should be consistent across all the different views in your app so users only have to learn one color language.

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The final factor to consider with color is accessibility. Make sure colors have enough contrast against their background to be readable and easily distinguishable. This includes ensuring the color themes you create are accessible for color-blind users.

You can find more detailed advice about the use of color when designing your Process Intelligence app in our Studio coloring best practice guide.

4. Keep headlines concise

The importance of headlines is often underestimated within information-dense environments like Process Intelligence apps. Those headlines have a critical role to play in conveying exactly what users are looking at (and what they should be looking for) quickly and effectively. Meaningful headlines help users identify the sections of the app that are relevant to them and instantly grasp the key takeaways.

Short, concise headlines take up less space, which improves the presentation of data visualizations. But headlines should also be precise, conveying the key information the user needs to know. Does a chart, for example, show on-time time delivery broken down by supplier, or on-time delivery over a three-month period? These details can be included in the headline while keeping it short and to the point.

“We often overlook how a killer headline can level up the user experience,” said Laura Araujo, Senior Design Manager at Celonis. “The key is nailing one that’s both concise and meaningful. A few well-chosen words can instantly enhance understanding and guide users effortlessly."

To maintain a cohesive look and feel across the app, headlines should be formatted consistently, using the same font style, size, and weight.

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