Duration
October - January 2024
Role
Sole Designer
Collaborators
MX team, CTO & 2 Engineers
Platform
Web
During the later stages of shipping the MVP of the consumer-facing app at Tradeblock, I embarked on a crucial parallel project: designing an internal powerhouse for our member experience team — the admin portal. My goal here was to use everything I know about visual hierarchy and information visualization to design a simple web-only interface that serves as the ultimate source of truth, offering comprehensive insights into every trade, product, and user on our platform.
The outcome was transformative. We slashed complaint resolution times by an astounding 98%. This boost in efficiency, translated into significant cost savings, propelling us closer to Tradeblock's profitability milestones.
Designing an admin panel would help hit several targets with a single arrow - streamlining support workflows, enabling swift complaint resolution, and reducing strain on engineering resources to focus on product enhancement.
A new admin panel would serve as a centralized hub, addressing inefficiencies faced by support agents who juggled multiple paid tools to access essential data.
Accessing all information in one place meant expedited complaint handling delighting customers with prompt support and informed assistance regarding their trades.
Setting up this tool would alleviate the need for constant reliance on back-end engineering resources for answers, thus letting them focus on the product experiences.
I flew down to our authentication center in Houston, where I spoke to the support agents about their workflow and observed the sneaker authentication process firsthand. This hands-on experience provided valuable insights into the journey of a shoe around the warehouse and helped me pinpoint key touchpoints crucial for support agent access.
Apart from manually tracking shoes during various authentication stages, support agents spent time on various tools like Zendesk, Shippo, Stripe, and GetStream to get different types of information.
To minimize front-end engineering resources, I had to strategically repurpose and adapt the existing components to suit the functionality required for the admin portal and hand it off as soon as possible.
Even though this wasn't a consumer-facing product, I was committed to delivering a user-friendly admin portal that maximizes productivity and minimizes development complexities. And, that starts by creating intuitive and efficient components.
A well-planned anatomy enabled the creation of multiple layout variations for the proposal component.
Collapsing and expanding containers to reveal secondary information when required.
Persistent sidebar to switch between proposals, members, and shoes with ease.
The sliding panel grants instant access to negotiation messages, enabling quick identification and resolution of issues with collectors.
Status indicator to quickly segregate proposals at a glance.
Advanced options via dropdown help find proposals even faster
Explore shoe images seamlessly with our sleek slideshow component.
Tooltips display brief labels or messages across the portal for guidance.
The member card is armed with all key information to solve their queries at the earliest.
A hallmark of a world-class customer support team is their consistent delivery of exceptional service, consistently exceeding customer expectations. The new admin portal not only surpassed industry standards in support metrics but also garnered praise from member agents who rely on it for over 40 hours per week.
initial response time to customer support tickets - down from 2 hours
tickets resolved in March 2024, most ever in a month since inception