Every year, a global enterprise software company publishes its flagship State of Design & Make research report — drawing on survey data from thousands of industry leaders across architecture, engineering, construction, product design, manufacturing, and media. It is one of the most widely read annual research publications in the design and engineering industries.
For the 2025 edition, En Interactive was engaged to build the report's complete interactive data visualisation layer — every chart, every filter, every interactive element through which a reader explores the findings.
The Brief
The client's design team had produced the visual language and content architecture for the 2025 report. The brief to En Interactive was precise: build the full interactive layer within the client's existing platform, to a fixed launch deadline tied to the report's publication date.
The report spans eight distinct insight sections — covering digital transformation, sustainability, AI adoption and hype cycle dynamics, organisational challenges, leadership confidence, the skilled talent gap, and investment trends. Each section required its own set of custom visualisations presenting survey findings across multiple dimensions: by response overall, by geography, and by three industry verticals.
The visualisation layer had to do what good data visualisation always must: make complex, multi-dimensional findings immediately legible to a reader who has not seen the underlying data — without simplifying to the point of losing the nuance that makes the research valuable.
The Technical Build
We built the interactive layer using React and D3.js — custom components engineered to the client's platform requirements and design specifications. The full scope covered bar charts, line charts, pie and donut charts, interactive geography visualisations, and a filtering system that allowed readers to slice the data by industry vertical and region and see the findings recalculate in real time.
Building data visualisation inside an enterprise platform of this scale is a different problem from building a standalone chart library. Every component had to conform to the client's existing design system, integrate with their platform's rendering environment, perform consistently across devices and connection speeds, and meet the accessibility standards a global enterprise platform requires. The components needed to feel native to the platform experience — not imported from outside it.
The geography visualisation layer presented its own specific engineering challenge. Survey data from respondents across multiple markets needed to be presented in a way that allowed meaningful comparison across regions without misrepresenting sample sizes or statistical significance. The filter interactions had to be responsive enough to feel instant and reliable enough to never show a broken state — on a page that would receive significant traffic from the day of publication.
The Deadline
The report had a fixed, non-negotiable publication date. There was no runway to slip. The build had to be complete, tested, and signed off in time for the client's launch.
It shipped on schedule.
This is worth stating plainly because it is often the part that sounds easiest and proves hardest. Deadline delivery in enterprise frontend work requires something beyond technical capability — it requires an accurate understanding of scope from the outset, disciplined progress tracking through the build, and the judgement to identify and resolve blockers before they become delays. The visualisation layer for a report of this scale, with this level of interactivity, landing on time is the result of that discipline applied consistently through the engagement.
What Enterprise Data Visualisation Actually Requires
This engagement illustrates something that is easy to underestimate when evaluating data visualisation work: the gap between a chart that looks correct and a chart that functions correctly under every condition a real user will encounter.
A static chart in a design mockup has no edge cases. A live, interactive React and D3.js component running inside an enterprise platform has hundreds. Filter combinations that return zero results. Geography views on screens of varying resolution. Data that loads at different speeds depending on network conditions. Hover states on touch devices. Colour contrast ratios that meet WCAG standards across every visualisation type. Transitions that remain smooth when a user filters rapidly. None of this is visible in the brief. All of it is the work.
The 2025 State of Design & Make report received tens of thousands of readers in its first weeks of publication. Every one of them interacted with the visualisation layer En Interactive built. None of them knew it was there — which is exactly the point. Good infrastructure disappears into the experience.
The Broader Implication
For organisations commissioning data-driven digital products — reports, dashboards, research publications, investor presentations — the visualisation layer is frequently treated as a design problem with a development execution step. This engagement demonstrates why that framing underestimates the engineering involved.
The translation from survey data to interactive insight, built to enterprise platform standards, delivered on a fixed deadline, performing correctly for a global audience — that is a systems engineering problem with an interface on top. It requires the same architectural discipline and delivery rigour as any other enterprise software engagement. The fact that the output is a chart rather than a database does not make it simpler. In some respects it makes it harder, because the complexity is invisible to the people who will judge whether it succeeded.
Sources
- Client research report — available on the client's website
- En Interactive Technologies — engagement documentation