Industry:
Smart buildings, proptech, b2b and B2B2C marketplace
Role:
First in-house end-to-end product designer (research, design, PRDs, issue/story prioritization)
Internal collaboration with:
CPO, product manager, CTO, BE & FE engineers, customer success, marketing, sales
External collaboration with:
Office space managers, team admins, part-time external UI design consultants
Tools & systems used
Ant design, Figma, Shortcut, Notion, Dovetail, Maze, Mixpanel, and more.
TL;DR
A new insights, space access, and user admin tool for building and office space managers
My role
As the first in-house product designer, I was responsible for the end-to-end design of this new platform.
The product ecosystem included a native app (iOS & Android), internal tooling, and hardware.
I built the design function from the ground up, hired the next UI designer, and served as the de facto design lead.
Challenge
The company was using a broken, internal-only tool to manage its customers, leading to massive inefficiencies.
Key problems research uncovered included hours of manual user onboarding, a lack of actionable data for decision-making, and a flawed, team-centric architecture.
Solution
I led the end-to-end design of a new, unified B2B admin platform built on a more intuitive location-centric model. The platform provided an insights dashboard, self-serve user management, and scalable permission controls. I made sure to design a cohesive cross-platform experience for the customers who used both our native app and the new web app.
Impact
Phase 1: The insights dashboard gave the hosts and team admins to have a real-time overview on the use of their buildings, specific spaces, as well as tenants and visitors. This allowed them to plan facility management and use it for short- and long-term space planning.
Phase 2: The user onboarding and space permissions features significantly reduced onboarding time: it went from being a job our engineers and customer success had to do to being a self-serve journey.
challenge.
Unifying ecosystems: Web app, native app, third party & hardware integration
The core challenge was designing for a fragmented ecosystem — not only of tools and data, but also of user roles.
On one side, we had to unify streams from native apps, hardware systems, and third-party integrations into a single source of truth for our admins.
On the other, we needed to account for overlapping but distinct responsibilities: Host Admins with broad permissions and complex workflows on the web platform, and Team Admins handling day-to-day tasks primarily through the mobile app.
The solution demanded both technical integration and role-sensitive design, ensuring that every admin, regardless of context, could act with confidence and consistency across platforms.
research.
4 key admin roles
Through stakeholder interviews and shadowing, four key admin roles became visible and several critical pain points converged that made a compelling case to develop this new platform.
1 Host account manager
Goal: Get a strategic overview of all locations and customers for entire accounts.
Primary tools: Web admin platform & mobile app
Key pain point(s): A disconnected experience between the web (for data) and mobile (for on-the-go tasks) with no single source of truth.
2 Location admin
Goal: Manage day-to-day operations, bookings, user access to specific office spaces.
Primary tools: Web admin platform & mobile app
Key pain point(s): No tools to see real-time room utilization and managing customer issues regarding space access quickly.
3 Team admin
Goal: Manage their team's members and grant them access to predefined bookable spaces.
Primary tools: Mobile app
Key pain point(s): No way to get an overview of their team's booking history, easy onboarding of new members or editing space access permissions.
4 Internal support (Orbit employee)
Goal: Troubleshoot customer issues and perform super-admin tasks on their behalf to provide fast support.
Primary tools: Web Admin Platform (Super Admin view) & mobile app (super admin view)
Key pain point(s): Lack of a centralized tool to quickly onboard new customers and diagnose and resolve customer problems, leading to long support times.
A deep understanding of our customers led to three core principles that guided the entire process
high-level journey.
Host & tenant lifecycle: high-level
"Host" and "Tenant" were the two main persona categories that used our products.
(This is just a high-level illustration. We created detailed customer journeys in and service blueprints in TheyDo.)
assessing legacy system.
Previous state: “setting things up” phase
Journey step: Select and edit access for company/team or user.
Screenshots and my annotations of internal legacy tooling.
research.
Synthesizing user feedback: Creating an exploratory tag system
To ground our product decisions in real user needs, I established a process for systematically analyzing qualitative feedback. This involved consolidating customer conversations from Intercom, running dedicated research sessions, and synthesizing everything into a centralized research library in Dovetail.
This process allowed us to move from anecdotal evidence to a clear, searchable database of user pain points.
I began by creating an exploratory tagging system in Dovetail.
With this, we were able to quickly categorize raw feedback and begin identifying emerging themes and patterns.
Synthesizing user feedback: an example
To ground our product decisions in real user needs, I established a process for systematically analyzing qualitative feedback. This involved consolidating customer conversations from Intercom, running dedicated research sessions, and synthesizing everything into a centralized research library in Dovetail.
This process allowed us to move from anecdotal evidence to a clear, searchable database of user pain points.
Raw feedback and interview transcripts consolidated in Dovetail.With this, we were able to quickly categorize raw feedback and begin identifying emerging themes and patterns.
Left: Synthesizing prototype testing feedback into tagged, thematic insights to identify recurring patterns.
Right: One of the key "Aha!" moment insights from the research
Creating a scalable research ontology
I then evolved this initial set of tags into a scalable and systematic ontology. This new taxonomy provided a consistent, shared language and created a durable framework for all future research, allowing us to connect insights across studies and build a true single source of truth for user feedback.
key insights.
3 critical themes
My initial research phase surfaced three critical themes that were not just minor usability issues; they
were systemic problems that caused daily friction for our team,
created a poor experience for our customers, and
blocked the business from making strategic, data-informed decisions.
1 Manual user & access control
We discovered that admins as well as our customer success team were spending hours each week manually onboarding new users.
Additionally, granting access to specific spaces and managing permissions had to be done via our engineers. Everyone involved was frustrated..
2 Lack of actionable data
The space admins and their leadership had no centralized data to make strategic, long-term as well as short-term decisions about real estate use, facility management, user growth trends or customer lifetime value.
3 Inefficient use of space
My investigation into meeting room 'ghost bookings' revealed a lack of accurate occupancy data, which frustrated employees and hampered operational tasks like facility management (e.g., cleaning, restocking micro kitchen items).
These initial insights showed that targeted digital solutions could solve major physical space inefficiencies.
decisions.
The strategic decision and a phased rollout strategy
The convergence of these critical issues made it clear that a series of small fixes would not be enough. We needed to invest in a unified admin platform to solve these problems at their core and enable future growth.
The core of our new strategy was to pivot from the flawed, team-centric model to a new, location-centric architecture, as illustrated above. This new foundation was essential to solve our users' problems at their core and enable future growth.
Building the blueprint
Picture of a “working document”.
Purple = related to phase 1 rollout “Insights”
Blue = related to phase 2 rollout “team admin and access”
Mapping the permission and onboarding flow revealed unexpected complexity around user types and access control. The yellow annotations capture decision points where we needed to balance security requirements with user experience. This detailed flow mapping enabled productive conversations with engineering about technical feasibility and helped us identify edge cases early
design system.
Ensuring cross-platform consistency: component examples
To ensure consistency and development velocity, I collaborated with our fullstack engineer and made the strategic decision to build the new admin platform using the Ant Design component library.
A key reason for this choice was to align with the native app's existing custom design system, which had been established by external consultants before I joined.
As a startup with limited resources, this pragmatic decision allowed us to create a cohesive cross-platform experience and save countless hours of development time.
solution phase 1.
Insights part of the platform
A single source of truth for admins about:
the use of their buildings and spaces
their tenants and their space booking behavior
new visitors coming through the Orbit app and their space booking behavior
Big small things: Empty states
A product's empty states are a critical part of the user experience. I saw this as an opportunity to not only provide clarity but also to inject brand personality.
This was also a chance for mentorship. I facilitated a brainstorming session with our CMO to align on the brand direction, and then guided our external part-time UI designer in creating a scalable illustration system that was then extended across all our touchpoints.
Login screen
Responsive example
A key requirement for the admin platform was for it to be fully responsive, allowing busy managers to access key insights whether they were at their desk or on the move.
This was especially critical for facility managers, who needed access to booking and user information on the go.
outcomes phase 1.
Outcome 1: Enabled data-driven facility workforce planning
For the first time, the new Insights Dashboard provided admins with real-time and historical utilization data, empowering them to move from guesswork to strategic planning.
Outcome 2: Revealed booking patterns & user behavior
In parallel with this project, I designed a new check-in feature and tag system for our native app. The admin platform integrated this new data, allowing hosts to see real-time booking patterns and statuses for the first time.
Outcome 3: Faster resolve of booking issues
By consolidating all booking and user information into one place, we created a single source of truth. This allowed support teams to resolve customer issues significantly faster.
phase 2 (space access & team onboarding) coming soon.
