Giving control to the users

The overview lets immigration specialists keep track of all their cases and see the critical information, dates and action items for each relocator.

As part of assessing the platform’s most used features, I ran research with the PM of the team, and we found that the overview was not one of the features the team rated well.

Business-wise, it was hurting the effectiveness of the operations team and the specialists’ capacity to handle a high volume of relocators. Time per relocator was increasing, because people could not finish tasks inside the system and fell back on manual copy-pasting between tools.

To learn the why, I ran a round of interviews with every role that used the overview. Immigration specialists are one role, but leaders and managers also rely on this screen to report and to work more efficiently.

Some of the questions I wanted to answer:

• What is the screen used for, and what do people expect from it?
• How easy or hard is it to reach the information each role needs?
• How much time does it take? For specialists, what is the average time invested per relocator?
• What is the most accessed information, and what is the most valuable?
• When pulling information out for reporting, client meetings or sharing with hosts, how do people expect to do it?

With a team of five, I owned the research end to end: I recruited, moderated and synthesised every session, then turned what we heard into the priorities we agreed with the CEO and CTO.

Some insights and pain points the sessions revealed:

• Every role uses the screen differently.
• Time spent varied with the number of relocators, but we could establish an average.
• The screen was restrictive, pushing people to extra tools and extra manual work.
• Items were hard to find because they looked alike: text-heavy, all with the same hierarchy.
• Too much cognitive load.
• Loading issues.
• Extracting information sometimes meant taking developers’ time to export or find something specific.

Exploring where filters should live

After several design iterations, hours of refinement and more than 50 cups of coffee, I had a version I felt comfortable testing.

Testing before building

We agreed that once this internal tool shipped, we would keep a close eye on it, ready to adapt. Before development, I ran a quick usability test to make sure the feature was ready, and it surfaced a few things we hadn’t expected:

• These users were used to Excel and spreadsheets, so they expected similar behavior.
• Dragging was an important interaction for them, to arrange the table’s columns the way they wanted.

Findability of items

In the previous version, people often struggled to find what they needed, which led to frustration and inefficiency. The new design makes each item stand out, and gives people precise filters so they can tailor the view to their own needs.

Less cognitive load

Tables are notorious clutter magnets: rows upon rows of data, all jumbled together. We cleaned them up, and gave people the power to toggle information on and off, so they can customise the view to what they need.

Extracting information

Managers need to extract, reorganise and present this information to leadership or clients. After filtering down to what they need, they can now extract and organize it in a few clicks.

And just like that, requests for information to the developers dropped.

After launch we closely monitored how the feature was used, with analytics alongside.

Faster internal task time

~40%

Fewer requests to the dev team for data

80%

Satisfaction from the internal team, over the previous version

4.7/5

People completed tasks about 40% faster, and requests for information from the dev team dropped by 80%. The operations team was happy to say goodbye to the old inefficiencies and embraced the new system.