From guesswork to guardrails: a panel redesign that cut client setup errors by 26%
MY ROLE ON THE PROJECT
I led product design for this project end to end, from early discovery through launch, working closely with Product, Sales and Customer Success. My objective was to reduce the setup errors that were generating support tickets and eroding trust in the tool, while making it something new hires could learn in days rather than months. I owned the UX strategy, the interaction design, and the prototyping.
Why enterprise account configuration needed a redesign.
Sales and Success teams used the Enterprise Panel every day to configure accounts, assign licenses, and turn features on or off for enterprise clients.
Controls were scattered across obscure tabs, there was no preview and no confirmation before consequential actions, and a wrong click could block a client's content access or misassign an entire license pool.
As a result, even routine account changes could feel risky, particularly for new CSMs.
BEFORE THE REDESIGN
Sometimes you think: is this a psychology test? Am I going to break everything if I press that button?
Anne, Sales Engineer (ex-CSM)
The business context was changing too.
The company was moving from a flat pricing model to a tiered one, portfolios were expanding from two, Tech and Marketing, into several to support personalized offers, and legacy clients with contract specific exceptions all had to keep working inside the same panel. New CSMs were expected to configure live enterprise accounts from day one, with no documentation and no structured onboarding.
Research showed why account settings were difficult to find and risky to change.
Through interviews and task based observation with new and experienced users, a few problems compounded each other. The panel held a long, undifferentiated list of features and settings with similar names and no icons or visual cues to tell them apart, which made it genuinely hard to find the right one, and a wrong click could break a live client's account.
New users were unsure what they were even allowed to do.
They didn’t know which toggles mattered, what license models meant, or whether clicking a button would break something.
I'm really just making assumptions
Helena, New CSM, Week 5
Experienced users relied on workarounds.
Even experienced users avoided parts of the interface and trained new hires to proceed with caution.
I just use CTRL+F, names are too similar
Sarah, Sales Engineer
Learning the panel took weeks or even months.
There was no structured onboarding, and much of the tool required institutional knowledge to use correctly.
It took me four months to feel fully confident
Daniel, New CSM
Reorganising the panel around the tasks people needed to complete.
I first considered improving the labels and documentation within the existing tabs. But the research showed that users struggled with how the settings were organised, not only how they were named.
I reorganised the information architecture around the tasks people completed most often, bringing related settings together instead of carrying the old tab structure forward.
Making configuration safer within the interface.
The initial proposal was to improve documentation and training.
User interviews suggested a more immediate need: people wanted to understand the consequences of a setting before changing a live account.
I focused the design on clearer feedback icons that made feature toggles and license models more explicit, and confirmation steps for anything that could affect a live client.
These safeguards needed to be available at the moment someone changed an account, including when they were working under time pressure.
One of the biggest challenges was protecting legacy clients from a pricing model they never signed up for
For legacy clients who had joined under an all you can eat contract, I designed flexible, custom feature panel settings so their plans could be upgraded or downgraded at any time as pricing needs evolved, without forcing them into a structure that didn't fit their original agreement.
Early results: fewer configuration-related support tickets.
The redesign has only been live for a few months, but the early signals are encouraging.
New CSMs are reporting higher confidence earlier in their onboarding, with some recent hires comfortable navigating the panel weeks ahead of where prior cohorts typically were.
Support tickets tied to misconfigurations have dropped by roughly 26 percent, which points to the new structure actually reducing the errors it was built to prevent, not just making the tool feel nicer to use.
“I don’t feel like I need to double-check every click anymore. It’s so much more intuitive.”
New CSM (informal post-launch feedback)
What this project changed in how I approach internal tools.
This panel had accumulated years of complexity because new requirements were added without revisiting the overall experience. Treating it as a product in its own right helped us address that underlying problem.
Most configuration mistakes happened because people had to guess what a setting would do. I now look for those moments of uncertainty early in the design process.
I learned to make routine settings quick to change, while adding a chance to review actions that could affect a live customer's access.
