Seat Management

Problem

Seat management relied on disconnected tools and manual support processes. Workplace teams handled approximately 6,700 seating requests each month, with an average resolution time of 10 days. Employees and managers had no way to manage seat assignments themselves, creating delays and significant operational overhead.

My role

Lead UX Designer and Researcher

I led the end-to-end UX strategy for Seat Management, from early research and product definition through design, content, validation, and launch. I partnered closely with Product and Engineering to transform a fragmented, support-heavy process into a connected self-service ecosystem.

My work spanned four interconnected experiences: an Admin Portal for workplace teams managing seating at scale, Manager Self-Service for managing team assignments, Employee Self-Service for employees to manage their own seats within defined guardrails, and Lifecycle Event Automation to streamline assignments during new hires, transfers, and departures.

My role extended beyond designing individual workflows. I helped shape the product strategy, align teams around customer needs, navigate technical and operational constraints, and create a consistent experience across the ecosystem.

What I built alongside the product

To scale UX beyond my own capacity, I created two AI-powered tools using Amazon’s enterprise AI platform. UX Evaluator reviews interface content for terminology consistency, design-system patterns, and accessibility, helping Product and Engineering catch quality issues earlier without relying on manual UX reviews.

I also built Content Crafter, an AI-searchable knowledge base that brings research insights, UI content, terminology, and approved design decisions into one place. Using AI-assisted, no-code workflows allowed me to rapidly prototype and refine both tools without engineering dependencies, turning UX knowledge and standards into self-service resources for the broader team.

Strategy & research

I treated Seat Management as one platform, not three separate products, because workplace planners, managers, and employees all depend on the same seating data.

Interviews, contextual inquiry, surveys, co-creation, and usability testing exposed a consistent issue: disconnected tools and conflicting data created workarounds and concentrated operational knowledge with a few experienced team members.

Managers wanted employees to have more choice, but needed to preserve team proximity and collaboration. That tension shaped the product direction.

Key decisions

I was designing a corporate seat assignment tool used across hundreds of office buildings and tens of thousands of employees. Our guiding vision became the neighborhood model: managers define a zone where their team should sit, while employees choose their own desk within it. It balanced employee autonomy with the structure managers need to keep teams co-located and connected.

For administrators, research also showed that one-off requests and large team moves required very different experiences. I designed Individual and Bulk Assignment as two paths within the same system, sharing validation and activity tracking while optimizing Bulk Assignment for scale, error handling, and spreadsheet-based workflows involving hundreds or thousands of employees.

Because the full vision depended on multiple teams’ products evolving together, the HR system, facilities databases, and employee-facing portals, we sequenced releases around immediate value. Five principles guided those tradeoffs: platform coherence, contextual intelligence, graceful degradation, trust through transparency, and manager-employee collaboration.

Collaboration & leadership

Seat Management required close partnership across Product, Engineering, Research, Accessibility, and workplace operations. As the lead designer, I worked beyond traditional UX boundaries to align teams around the customer experience, navigate technical constraints and changing requirements, and gain director-level support by presenting design walkthroughs that connected customer needs to product decisions.

When our Product Manager went on parental leave during a critical phase, I stepped in to help lead the program through launch. I ran product and customer acceptance testing for the Admin Portal, led usability testing, synthesized findings, and partnered directly with Engineering to prioritize and resolve issues. This expanded my role from leading the experience to helping the broader team make decisions, remove blockers, and stay on track for launch.

Outcome & impact

Before this work, a seat change took an average of 10 days through a help desk ticket, with roughly 6,700 tickets each month and more than 55 people supporting the process. Team moves could take 1 to 8 hours of manual work. Since launch, the Admin Portal has processed 35,000+ successful seat actions globally, reducing individual tasks from 20 to 30 minutes to under 5 minutes, while Bulk Assignment now supports validated uploads of up to 5,000 employees at once.

Manager and Employee Self-Service bring common seat changes down to under 3 minutes. Early pilots across six buildings showed a 35% reduction in ticket volume in the first full week, with 139 users completing 157 seat changes in two weeks. The platform is working toward a longer-term goal of reducing seat assignment tickets by 50% year over year.

Reflections

This project reminded me of something I have learned throughout my career: sometimes the most important UX contribution is not the interface, but helping the team see the problem differently. Research uncovered the tension between employee flexibility and manager oversight, and that insight shaped both the product strategy and the platform architecture.

Building the AI-powered evaluation and knowledge tools also changed how I work. They created a shared quality standard that Product, Engineering, and Design could reference, reducing review cycles and helping maintain consistency across three connected products. More importantly, they showed me how UX knowledge can scale beyond the designer and become part of how the broader team works.

The Seat Management Platform reinforced what designing at organizational scale means to me. The work goes beyond the interface. It means shaping the strategy, connecting systems and data with real human needs, and creating experiences that work across products, teams, and the physical workplace.