MISSION CONTROL
Creating a new internal tools platform that helped Unite Us teams cut customer onboarding times by 50%.
Enterprise
Internal Tools
End-to-end Design
Customer success teams at Unite Us relied on several outdated internal tools platforms in order to perform important customer-related tasks such as configuring organizations, users and payment systems. These tools were bottlenecking productivity and were difficult to maintain. In 2023, the Internal Tools team received the green light to create a new, modern platform that would better serve users and engineers. That platform was ultimately named Mission Control.
Company
Unite Us, a social tech company
Team
Designer (me)
Researcher
Product Manager
Engineers x4
Contributions
Research, userflow mapping, wireframes, high-fidelity mockups, interactive prototypes
Design Impact
1200
Clicks saved for bulk operations of 100+ users
50%
Decrease in customer configuration times
2 weeks
wait time eliminated through self-serve tools
Research Findings
Collaborating with my PM and UX Researcher, we embarked on a 2 week research project to identify workflows, pain points and areas where we could make the greatest impact. Through user interviews, shadowing sessions and jira ticket analysis, we discovered the following:
🔁
High volume of manual, repetitive tasks requires time and increases human error
🔍
Search functionality limitations complicate finding and avoiding duplicate entries
🗓️
Getting engineering assistance for large projects often takes 2-4 weeks
Planning
Feature Prioritization
Guided by research findings, I drafted roughly 20 proposed features to include in the new platform. However, with limited bandwidth and priorities, we needed to prioritize which features we would work on. Over the course of several meetings, I met with customer success, engineering and product to define our roadmap and prioritize which features we would start working on first. With leadership's emphasis on decreasing customer onboarding times, features that contributed towards that goal were prioritized.
Design System
For this new platform, I opted to utilize our recently implemented UU Design System which was being rolled out across the main customer platform. Although I had the option to create something new (and was very tempted to), it would have also increased upkeep and diverted resources away from building features with greater user and business impact.
Solutions
Reducing repetitive, manual tasks with bulk actions
Up until now, whenever users had to handle hundreds of users, they would either need to configure everything manually or wait 2-4 weeks for an engineer to assist. Mission Control's bulk action functionality enabled users to modify hundreds of accounts at once with a single click, eliminating the need to rely on engineers. For jobs dealing with 100 accounts or more, this easily saved a user 1200 clicks and 2-4 weeks of waiting on other teams.
Saving time and reducing duplicates with enhanced search
The old search feature was heavily relied upon to prevent duplicate configurations, but it only displayed limited results, was extremely case-sensitive and only supported searching by name. I worked with engineers to address as many painpoints as possible by displaying more results, making the search fuzzier to better catch variations, and being able to sort, filter and search by attributes. When comparing search behaviors on the old vs. new systems, we gradually saw a 40% decrease in repetitive variation searching.
Cross-Company Collaboration
Promo Video to spread awareness
In late 2024, Mission Control finally launched into production. However, despite the positive increases to user productivity and self-sufficiency, it wasn't getting much recognition from leadership or other teams. As this platform was meant to be utilized company-wide, we wanted to make sure everyone knew about it.
To fix this, I spent two weeks creating a promo video for Mission Control, highlighting its features and potential to improve workflows for all teams. It was eventually aired during a company all-hands meeting and was very well received, with the COO saying that he "couldn't stop rewatching it".
Breaking through silos and minimizing duplicative engineering
After the promo video aired, other domains started reaching out to us wanting to see how they could leverage our platform. One such team was building a new self-serve onboarding flow for new customers, and their plans for the internal-facing interface had significant overlap with our bulk actions functionality. Getting together, we were able to figure out a strategy where their team could use our featureset without having to build it out on their own, saving quarters of development time and hundreds of engineering hours.
Learnings
Boundaries are good (especially with clients)
In our team’s effort to be transparent and accountable, we ended up being too visible to our users that it ended up disrupting our work. When customer service reps are commenting on Jira tickets related to backend database naming conventions, it’s time to set some boundaries. Thankfully, with some skilled mediation, we were able to reset expectations, giving our users the space to give us feedback, and allowing ourselves the space to build and deliver with fewer surprise requirements.
