Improving decision confidence in enterprise device provisioning

OVERVIEW

As Electric’s customer base grew and device catalogs expanded, admins were increasingly responsible for selecting and purchasing devices across more roles, locations, and organizational structures - often without clear internal standards.

CONTRIBUTION AND OUTCOMES

I joined Jack as a Product Designer where I worked cross functionally - designing the web application. I led the design of the dashboard and the ‘Auto Apply’ user

MY ROLE

UX/UI, Design Systems, Research

THE TEAM

1 PM, 4 SWE

TIMELINE

Aug - Oct 2025

(Shipped)

CONTEXT —

In 2025, Electric set out to strengthen platform stickiness and enterprise readiness as its customer base scaled

What began as a streamlined IT procurement experience was evolving into a multi-system operations platform - spanning purchasing, provisioning, MDM enrollment, billing, and asset lifecycle management. To support this shift, Electric focused on a few goals:

THE PROBLEM —

Satisfaction decreased as IT Admin users were struggling with to complete device procurement

During our team’s biweekly meetings to discuss data findings learnings with the CX team. I discovered that admins were spending ~8.4 minutes from receiving an employee task notification to completing checkout.

RESEARCH & DISCOVERY —

Identifying the bottleneck within IT device procurement

To get the ball rolling, I leveraged partnerships with stakeholders to explore value add opportunities. Utilizing Pendo, I also noticed that users spent the majority of their time (average 4 minutes out of 8 total) in the ‘Browse & Select’ phase - not navigating to the storefront, not on product detail pages, not in checkout. To understand the behavioral patterns causing the delay, I conducted mixed methods research: 20+ surveys and 9 in depth interviews and CX call shadowing. I uncovered…

DEFINING THE OPPORTUNITY —

Transitioning from "search" to "standards"

The opportunity lies in evolving our catalog from a traditional discovery marketplace into a governance-aware platform. While the catalog must remain a space for exploration and revenue-driving discovery, we have a critical opening to reduce the "Defensibility Gap" - the friction between finding a product and knowing it's the "safe" choice.

HMW transform the procurement experience from an anxious manual search into a confident and efficient execution?

BUILD —

The friction within our current system & data architecture

During ideation of potential solutions, the path to getting there was blocked by a fragmented data architecture. To build a system that felt simple for the user, I uncovered systemic conflicts - like Group vs. Role logic and Nested Hierarchies - that were actually causing the user's manual friction.

The strategic context we had to consider…

I led collaborative sessions to align initial multi squad, stakeholder roadmaps & constraints. Our customer base was in transition. Current users were primarily mid-market companies (50-200 employees) with single IT admins making ad-hoc purchasing decisions. But we were actively onboarding enterprise customers (250+ employees) with dedicated IT teams who would have different needs and expectations.

EXPLORATIONS —

With these constraints in mind, I led the exploration of three mental models

I worked with my PM to build a framework that solves for our current users while ensuring the system could handle the massive influx of data and users that the HRIS integration would bring. As we scale into larger organizations, the structural conflicts between simple flat lists and complex nested hierarchies become even more pronounced.

Exploration #1

Manual favorites by group

Pros: sense of control, no data dependency

Cons: Too manual (tagging), different group logic might be too confusing to navigate manually for users

Exploration #2

Administrative filters

Pros: Limits options to approved "standards” providing clarity for both user types. Enterprise scalability*

Cons: Pre-set up work, too much top down control

🏆 Exploration #3: selected!

Guided selection module

Pros: Zero setup for users, contextual intelligence, reduced time to value, and ability to scale.

Tradeoffs: Backend will require data mapping

SYSTEMS UX CHALLENGES —

Designing for resilience & scalability: inheritance & multi-group logic

Once we aligned on Guided Selection Module, I designed system logic to resolve the three architectural tensions. For nesting, the system inherits recommendations from a parent group when a sub-group lacks history. For multi-group users, it defaults to the most specific group but allows admins to override.

FINAL DESIGNS —

Takeaways

LEARNINGS

Establish a design system early! Creating a design system early in the project provided consistency across the platform and streamlined the handoff to engineering. It really educed design debt and made future iterations more efficient.

Always keep all stakeholders informed. Sometimes a quick chat or huddle can really save potential extra work and misunderstandings.

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