Enterprise
Internal Tools
End-to-end Design
Shipped
Customer success teams at Unite Us relied on several outdated internal tools platforms in order to perform important customer-related tasks such as configuring organizations, users and payment systems.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.
As lead designer on the Internal Tools team, I led the end-to-end design for the creation of a new internal tools platform in order to empower employees to work faster and become more self-sufficient.
Disclaimer: The following case study contains no PHI or sensitive information.
Role
Research, userflow mapping, wireframes,
high-fidelity mockups, interactive prototypes,
Team
• Lead Designer (me)
• UX Researcher
• Product Manager
• Engineers x4
Timeline
Jan 2024 - Dec 2024
Impact
• 1200 less clicks required for bulk operations
• 50% faster customer onboarding times
• 30% decrease in engineer support tickets
BACKGROUND
People on the inside deserve some love, too.
The internal tools platform used by customer success teams hadn't been significantly updated since the company's founding. There were many long-standing usability issues that required extensive use of workarounds. Furthermore, the amount of tech debt it had accumulated made it difficult for engineers to fix.
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
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Search functionality limitations complicate finding and avoiding duplicate entries
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Getting engineering assistance for large projects often takes 2-4 weeks
PROBLEM
The outdated internal tools platform is causing bottlenecks for customer-success teams and engineers, resulting in long turnaround times for customers.
PLANNING
So many features, so little bandwidth
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.
Speeding things up with the 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.
Unified User Profile
The existing platform generated a separate user profile for each organization a user was a member of, leading to confusion, duplicate actions and higher chance of errors. I collaborated deeply with the engineers to consolidate every user's profile onto a single page, reducing required clicks by 2-5x.
Solving frustrating input fields by optimizing UI
The antiquated UI elements on the old platform were a source of frustration and something interviewees were very vocal about. These were low-effort, high-impact wins that greatly improved the user experience.
Saving time with a better hours of operation modal
Users mentioned how arduous it was to input hours of operations for locations, including having to enter hours multiple times, and not supporting split hours and 24-hour operations. A revised hours component streamlined input by providing faster methods to configure hours.
Saving time (and sanity) with proper multi-select options
Employees were often subjected to using single-select dropdowns when adding 20+ items to a profile, leading to soul-crushing repetitive clicking and utilizing dozens of duplicate browser tabs. By replacing it with a multi-select dropdown from the UU Design system, they could add hundreds of items with a single click.
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.
Impact
The Mission Control internal tools platform launched to employees in Q4 2024 and has since provided several benefits to various departments:
• 1200 less clicks required for bulk operations
• 50% faster customer onboarding times
• 30% decrease in engineer support tickets
TAKEAWAYS
Design systems are a cultural change
When implementing a design system in a company that's been around for several years, you're challenged not only with tackling lots of technical debt, but also correcting long-standing habits that led to that accumulation. In addition to exercising self-control, encouraging engineers to use centralized components instead of making things from scratch (or haphazardly copy-pasting code blocks from elsewhere) went a long way in driving efficiency and reusability.
Boundaries are good (especially when your clients are your coworkers)
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.
