SolarWinds IT Trends Index
Three years transforming SolarWinds' annual IT industry report from a static PDF into an interactive data tool — consistently driving 5x more media coverage than static assets, with reporters embedding the experience directly in their coverage.
SolarWinds · 2020 · 
This case study is password protected
Enter the password to view the full work.
Incorrect password — try again.
The challenge
SolarWinds’ IT Trends Index is a valuable annual report on the state of the IT industry — full of data that IT professionals, analysts, and journalists genuinely care about. But the format was doing the content a disservice. A PDF is something you download, skim, and forget. SolarWinds needed a way to make the data worth coming back to, and to give journalists and IT pros a tool they could use rather than just quote.
What I did
Over three years, we pushed the IT Trends Index progressively further into interactive territory — building tools that let IT professionals dig directly into the data, filter by role, company size, or region, and use the findings to inform their own planning.
The key insight was that journalists and analysts don’t just want to read research. They want to pull their own angles from it. An interactive tool lets them do that — and several went further, embedding the full experience directly in their coverage. That’s something a static PDF can never achieve.
Each year we raised the bar. From initial interactive data visualisations, we moved toward narrative-driven experiences that walked users through the most significant findings while giving them freedom to explore further.
Built to travel
Every finding in the report shipped with its own social card, built on a modular design system — a base template, a headline layer, and an icon layer that composed into publication-ready assets in minutes. The system kept every card on-brand across three years of campaigns while letting the team produce dozens of variants at speed.
The experience was built mobile-first, so the same interactive data held up whether a CIO opened it at a desk or an IT pro scrolled it on the train.
The results
- 5x more media coverage than static report assets — consistently, year over year
- Multiple publications embedded the full interactive experience in their editorial coverage
- Three consecutive years of the programme, each iteration more sophisticated than the last
- Established interactive research assets as a standard format for SolarWinds’ broader content strategy