Happeo's admin panel couldn't keep up with how enterprise customers actually manage users. No bulk actions, opaque user status, broken OU inheritance. Routine tasks were generating support tickets instead of being self-serve. I led a full IA and interaction redesign of the admin settings experience, working from a detailed audit and competitive analysis through to shipped improvements used by enterprise organisations managing thousands of users.
TL;DR
Problem: Admins at large organisations couldn't manage users at scale. No bulk operations, unclear suspended/deleted states, and missing OU inheritance forced dependency on Happeo support for tasks that should take seconds. What I did: Full UI audit, stakeholder and admin interviews, competitive analysis against Google Workspace, iterative redesign of user management workflows and OU settings. Impact: Reduced admin support burden, unblocked self-serve bulk operations, and significantly improved clarity for suspended/deleted user states. Confirmed through direct admin feedback and reduced support ticket volume.
Admins couldn't manage users efficiently. No bulk actions, unclear user status, and missing OU inheritance forced dependency on support teams for routine tasks.
In-depth UI audit, stakeholder interviews, competitive analysis (Google Workspace), iterative design concepts, and cross-team collaboration with engineering.
Support ticket data, admin workflow analysis, direct stakeholder input, and Google Workspace UX patterns as validation reference.
UX Research · Interaction Design · UI Redesign · Cross-team collaboration · PM, Engineering team and other stakeholders.
User Management
Google OU Management
Problem
Admin users managing teams and permissions in Happeo faced multiple pain points that slowed their workflows and created dependency on support teams.
Admins struggle to ensure all eligible employees have access, creating workflow disruptions across the organization.
Lack of clarity on suspended and deleted users complicates management and increases support tickets.
Tasks like filtering, bulk management, and exporting users are time-consuming due to limited UI features.
Missing flexible OU inheritance settings make managing permissions challenging for large organizations.
Admins can't suspend or delete users directly, increasing dependency on support teams for routine tasks.
Design Audit
An in-depth audit of the existing admin settings UI revealed critical usability gaps across user management workflows.
No way to understand what's going to happen when user changes those settings and misleading information.
Unclear search with no hint text or suggestions, making it difficult to find specific users or groups efficiently.
No way to do bulk OU management, admins had to change settings one-by-one for each organizational unit.
No easy way to understand the workflow around OU management, leading to errors and confusion.
Design Concepts
The redesign introduced a table-based user management interface with bulk selection, advanced filtering, and OU inheritance management inspired by Google Workspace.
The new table structure with filters, and bulk selection with bulk action. This interface gives admins a clear, scannable view of all users and allows them to take action on multiple accounts at once, dramatically reducing the time required for routine management tasks.
This concept involves adding new checkboxes similar to User Management, allowing bulk selection with a parent-child relationship, and enabling bulk actions. This idea originates from Google Workspace organizational unit management, where users can change settings in bulk with parent and child inheritance, as well as separate them with overridden changes.
Impact
Streamlined user management reduced dependency on support teams for routine tasks. Admins can now handle user lifecycle management, from provisioning to suspension, entirely within the product without raising support tickets.
Clear user status indicators and better audit trails improved admin confidence. Admins can now see at a glance which users are active, suspended, or deleted, and can take action directly from the management interface.
Bulk management and OU inheritance concepts enabled admins to manage large organizations more efficiently. Enterprise customers with thousands of users can now apply policies across entire organizational units in a single action.
Conclusion
Admin interfaces are often under-designed, yet they sit at the core of enterprise product adoption. This project demonstrated how deeply understanding admin workflows, and designing tools that match those mental models, can dramatically reduce friction and support overhead while giving organisations real control over their platform.
The OU inheritance concept, inspired by Google Workspace patterns and validated through stakeholder sessions, proved that enterprise-grade complexity can be made approachable when the UX is grounded in user reality. This work directly contributed to improved platform confidence and NPS for Happeo's enterprise customers.