Support Admin Tool for aprilOS
🤔 The challenge: Urgent hiring meets limited tools
During tax season at April, a tax app company, the team faced an urgent need to onboard a large number of contract support staff to handle the high-volume season. However, the existing internal tools were inefficient and prone to errors. The support team relied on manual processes and spreadsheets to manage onboarding, role assignment, and offboarding, which created serious bottlenecks and security risks.
Key challenges included:
Role assignment was previously done via a large spreadsheet, which was prone to human error.
There was no efficient way to bulk invite users or invite contractors with different roles at the same time.
The offboarding process was slow, creating potential security vulnerabilities, as ex-contractors still had platform access after their contracts ended.
Given the urgency of the hiring process and security concerns, the project became a priority for the team. My task was to design an efficient, scalable solution to address these pain points while ensuring easy role management and secure offboarding.
⚡️ The Solution: A streamlined support admin tool
new screens and features
Bulk Invitations: Since the engineering limitations at the time didn't allow for bulk invitations across different roles simultaneously, I designed a simple tool that allowed admins to invite contractors in bulk within the same role. This eliminated the need for manual, error-prone processes.
Role Assignment UI: The previous system required administrators to update a spreadsheet for role assignment, which was slow and error-prone. I designed a streamlined role assignment UI that allowed admins to assign a role to individual contractors quickly and without mistakes.
Constraints & Design Trade-offs:
Due to engineering limitations, users needed to have Google or april.com email accounts.
Admins couldn’t create new roles, only assign pre-set ones.
Bulk invites were limited to one role type per batch, requiring a clear, intuitive workflow.
A streamlined role assignment UI that allowed admins to assign a role to individual contractors quickly and without mistakes
A streamlined role assignment UI that allowed admins to assign a role to individual contractors quickly and without mistakes
A straightforward screen for deleting or offboarding users, ensuring that only active contractors had access.
Conclusion
The Support Admin Tool I designed for aprilOS helped transform a previously slow, error-prone process into an efficient, streamlined system that supported the needs of the rapidly growing team during a critical tax season. By focusing on user needs, security, and efficiency, the tool directly contributed to a smoother, faster onboarding process and ensured better security practices. This project not only addressed an urgent business need but also provided an opportunity to showcase how a well-designed tool can improve the workflow of support teams and reduce operational risks.
Looking ahead
While this tool significantly improved the contractor management process during tax season, there is always room for improvement. Future versions of this tool could explore:
Enhanced reporting features to track the performance and activities of contractors.
Further role flexibility in bulk invites (currently, only one role per batch is allowed).
API integration for even smoother workflow automation.
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Copyright © 2024 Adina S. Katz
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