Executive Triaging System
From paper trails to a streamlined request system for one of the most active consulting firm's CEO.
UX
Visual Design
Product Design
Avanade
tl;dr
I was the primary product designer on an executive request tracking system for a global consulting firm, transforming a fully manual, email- and paper-based workflow into a centralized digital platform. I owned day-to-day UX and visual design, partnered closely with engineering to validate feasibility, and helped ship a system that fully replaced the previous process for the executive operations team.
This project spanned multiple phases and marked my transition into a full product design role, including close collaboration with development, iterative design decisions under platform constraints, and support through production and QA.
Overview
I joined this project as the primary designer supporting the executive operations team at a global consulting firm. This team was responsible for intaking, triaging, and coordinating all requests for the CEO’s time, which included meeting preparation, materials gathering, and follow-ups.
At the time, this work relied on a fragmented, manual process involving emails, printed documents, and hand-offs between team members. My role was to help redesign this workflow end-to-end and move it into a centralized, customizable digital platform that could support different responsibilities across the team while improving clarity, speed, and consistency. This was also a chance for us to demonstrate the capabilities of Microsoft's Power Platforms, which became a core design constraint to tune our designs around.
Stopping the Marriage
When I joined the project, several screens had already been designed through committee-driven decision-making, with limited UX input. These designs relied on dense multi-column layouts, lacked clear hierarchy, and made it difficult for users to move quickly through requests.
Complicating this, the existing designs were close to development approval. I worked quickly to assess where usability would break down and proposed alternative layouts that prioritized scannability, clearer flows, and power-user efficiency.
Through a series of focused design reviews and stakeholder discussions, the executive team ultimately agreed to pivot away from the original direction and rework the core experience before moving forward. It was like stopping the marriage at the very last moment. No theatric bursting into an alter, but we'll take collective stakeholder agreement.
Showing not telling
To align stakeholders and engineering early, I relied heavily on high-fidelity prototypes. These allowed us to validate interaction patterns, navigation, and feature sequencing before committing to build.
I met daily with development leadership to review designs, validate feasibility within platform constraints, and discuss trade-offs around scope and timing. In parallel, I tested prototypes with core members of the executive operations team to ensure the system supported real-world workflows.
To align stakeholders and engineering early, I relied heavily on high-fidelity prototypes. These allowed us to validate interaction patterns, navigation, and feature sequencing before committing to build.
These prototypes became a shared reference point across design, engineering, and stakeholders, reducing ambiguity and accelerating decision-making.
I would wire up high fidelity wireframes to help showcase functionality, navigation, and explain new features. This helped the OCEO team grasp key features without digging through lengthy docs or chaotic Mural boards. Eventually we had a working prototype that someone could navigate as if it was the fully coded product. Great for explaining ideas, terrible for keeping track of components. This wasn’t sustainable, so I then took some time to create a system to help track all the bits and pieces of our new product. It was time for (cue suspenseful music), a design system!
Designing a Design System
As the system grew in complexity, maintaining consistency across screens and prototypes became increasingly difficult. To address this, I created a lightweight design system that documented core components and usage patterns.
The system allowed us to:
Maintain visual and interaction consistency across the platform
Communicate clearly with developers through a shared source of truth
Make global changes efficiently without reworking individual screens
I also introduced a change log that developers could reference to understand when and how components were updated, which significantly improved design–engineering communication throughout the build process.
Function by Function
There were three central parts to ERTS: The Intake/Triage system, the trackers, and dashboard.
Intake & Triage
Requests for the CEO’s time moved through a structured lifecycle, allowing team members to capture context, plan preparation meetings, document notes, and track follow-ups — all within a single system.
Trackers
Because team members had different responsibilities, I designed customizable trackers that allowed individuals to surface the information most relevant to their role, reducing noise and context-switching.
Dashboards
Dashboards surfaced high-priority requests, upcoming meetings, and daily tasks. Through user testing, we refined what information needed to be visible at a glance versus what required deeper interaction.
Takeaways
This was the longest project I’ve worked on so far at Avanade, and was also the first time I was operating more in a product designer role compared to a envisioning role as a UX Designer. It taught me how much I enjoy watching a product evolve through iteration as well as being able to communicated with the development team, conduct QA on dev passes, and overall think deeper about the product I was designing. It was one thing to come up with an idea based on key user needs, but it was another thing to engage with how the platform we built our solution provided challenges and constraints, understanding which feature was more important to develop first, and continually work with the OCEO team to craft it into something that was really tailored for them.
This was my first time working on a design system, and I feel like the trial and errors of building out the Dev Page really helped me tidy up as a designer, and helped me become a better teammate to my developer counterparts. We received a lot of positive feedback from the developers, and eventually became my go to plan for designing with a new design system.
This was the longest project I’ve worked on so far at Avanade, and was also the first time I was operating more in a product designer role compared to a envisioning role as a UX Designer. It taught me how much I enjoy watching a product evolve through iteration as well as being able to communicated with the development team, conduct QA on dev passes, and overall think deeper about the product I was designing. It was one thing to come up with an idea based on key user needs, but it was another thing to engage with how the platform we built our solution provided challenges and constraints, understanding which feature was more important to develop first, and continually work with the OCEO team to craft it into something that was really tailored for them.
This was my first time working on a design system, and I feel like the trial and errors of building out the Dev Page really helped me tidy up as a designer, and helped me become a better teammate to my developer counterparts. We received a lot of positive feedback from the developers, and eventually became my go to plan for designing with a new design system.