MISSION CONTROL
Creating a modern internal tools platform to improve the lives of employees, engineers and customers.
Background
Unite Us employees rely on an ancient, neglected internal tools platform named HQ2 in order to perform essential customer-related tasks such as configuring organizations, user accounts, and payments systems. This platform is notorious for being unreliable, difficult to use, and due to its outdated architecture, difficult to fix. In 2023, the Internal Tools team received the green light to create a modern, unified internal platform that enabled the rapid creation and deployment of features that improved employees’ productivity (and sanity). That platform was ultimately named Mission Control.
My role
As lead designer on the Internal tools team, I was responsible for designing Mission Control’s information architecture, user interface, and workflow improvements. In order to bring this new platform to life, I partnered closely with a bunch of awesome people, who also happened to be UX Researchers, Product Managers and Engineers.
Design Impact
Mission Control successfully launched in November 2024, providing over 500 employees with powerful bulk action capabilities and a streamlined interface. These improvements resulted in 4x less clicking and up to 50% faster customer onboarding times.
Challenges and Solutions
Powerful bulk actions
Challenge: How do we make using internal tools less soul crushing?
On HQ2, most actions had to be done individually, which was brutal for employees handling dozens or hundreds of accounts. People found clever workarounds to this problem, such as opening 30 duplicate tabs or invoking arcane keyboard shortcuts. For extremely large batches, employees could put in a request to engineers, which would typically take 2-4 weeks to process. Naturally, none of these solutions were ideal.
Mission Control introduced bulk actions, enabling employees to perform hundreds of actions in a single click, such as inviting new users, activating accounts, and editing feature roles. Other time-saving features included multi-select dropdowns, and the ability to duplicate payment configurations across deployments. These improvements empowered users to work faster and rely less on engineers.
Enhanced search
Challenge: How can we make it easier for users to find what they’re searching for?
Search was one of the most utilized features on HQ2, and one of the most frustrating. Users first had to search for any duplicate records before performing any tasks, but the case sensitivity, narrow scope and limited search results made it very difficult to use.
By partnering with engineering, we redesigned the search experience to make it more robust, increased the number of search results, added additional search criteria, and added filtering and sorting. Increased utilization of these features showed that users appreciated the improvements.
Cross-platform integration
Challenge: How do we better integrate our features with other teams' projects?
While working on bulk user imports, I noticed overlap with another team’s project: self-serve onboarding for new organizations. Their team was focused on the customer-facing flow but hadn’t yet planned how internal teams would process the incoming data.
Together with my PM, I coordinated with our counterparts on their team to align our efforts. We designed our projects to complement each other, giving each what they needed and avoiding having two engineering teams building overlapping features. Although these projects were in the planning phase when my time at Unite Us came to an end, the relationships we established should set up both projects for success.
Promo Video
Challenge: How do we get the company to notice us?
In November 2024 Mission Control finally launched into production. However, for the impact that it had on our employees and the value that it brought, it wasn’t getting much recognition from leadership.
To fix this, I decided to make a promo video highlighting the features and benefits of Mission Control, which was eventually aired during our company all-hands meeting. Fortunately this was very well received, with the COO saying that he “couldn’t stop rewatching it”, which I’d say is a good enough sign.
Over the next few weeks we started to get inquiries from other teams and domains on how they could leverage our platform for their own domains. Mission Complete!
Closing Thoughts
Lessons
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.