This project addressed a core usability problem in ActivTrak’s admin experience: customers struggled to reconcile users, licenses, and tracking status due to duplicate agents, ghost records, and unclear system behavior. I led the end-to-end redesign of the Users experience, synthesizing research into actionable problem statements and designing a clearer information hierarchy between users and agents. The solution introduced merge workflows, bulk actions, and inline status management aligned with how admins actually manage accounts. The redesign eliminated a class of support escalations entirely and significantly improved user sentiment post-launch.
The existing user management experience made it difficult for administrators to understand the relationship between users, licenses, and tracking status. Duplicate agents drove unnecessary license costs, ghost records cluttered the interface, and corrective actions such as deleting or untracking a user produced confusing outcomes. Fixing these issues required navigating legacy workflows that were difficult to discover and difficult to trust.
After working through several rounds of interviews with end-users, I synthesized research into a set of problem statements tied to specific jobs-to-be-done that guided the redesign. I defined a clearer structure separating users and agents, then designed workflows that aligned with real administrative tasks. The solution introduced merge flows, bulk actions, and inline status management so administrators could resolve issues directly within the user list instead of navigating multiple views.
I owned the work as a solo design contributor. My responsibilities included UX strategy, research synthesis, interaction design, wireframing, workflow design, microcopy, and in product guidance using Pendo to support rollout and adoption.
The Sr. Director of PM drove adoption of a tabbed navigation architecture that I flagged as a scalability risk. Even though user-testing showed that users were able to accomplish their tasks with little to no friction, we started to see the effects of this decision immediately with global search and user merge both on the roadmap. The tabs-based approach would have created structural dead ends. The decision was made under significant top-down pressure and the team was deep into delivery when the problem materialized.
I made the call to roll back the tabbed approach despite the late stage and the organizational pressure behind it. I brought a clear scalability argument to the table, documenting exactly how the tab structure would fail when global search and merge were added and advocated for the architectural change before a single line of that work was built on a broken foundation.
Reversing a direction championed by a Sr. Director risked being seen as obstructionist and created real schedule pressure. The alternative, shipping the tabbed approach and retrofitting later, would have cost far more in development cycles and created a worse admin experience. The short-term pain was accepted to avoid a much larger long-term one.
The right time to fix a structural problem is before it ships, not after. Seniority of the person driving a bad decision doesn't change the calculus — it just raises the cost of staying quiet. Advocating clearly, early and with evidence is the job, regardless of who's in the room.
The redesigned experience simplified how administrators reconcile user records and manage licenses. After launch, the team saw zero support escalations related to the previous issues and received strong positive feedback from users.
