Re-architecting a 10-year-old, feature-bloated platform into one clear system for the managers and residents who live in it every day.
Design outcomes and usability-test findings, not post-launch business metrics.
Ten years of teams bolting on features with no organizing principle left a platform stuck in the build trap. Navigation was a Jenga tower; setup took a week of calls.
Lead UX Architect, leading the information architecture and directing two designers and a BA across the manager and resident experiences, research through testing.
A re-architected, self-serve platform organized around how community managers actually think, that removed whole sections of complexity without losing function.
An accreted menu became six clear areas: dashboard, people, devices, history, account, help.
A flow with a 100% first-attempt failure rate in testing became a single setting on the group page, deleting an entire section without losing a capability.
Surveys and sales calls became an online wizard, and 12 confusing plans became one hardware-agnostic plan.
The Chamberlain Group is one of the largest manufacturers of garage doors and gate controllers in the world. The hardware was best in class. The software was not, and in a market where smaller competitors were racing toward end-to-end solutions, the experience gap had become a real business risk. So the company committed to rebuilding the platform from the ground up.
Over ten years, team after team had added features with no shared organizing principle. The navigation had become a Jenga tower: every new feature made the whole structure more unstable, and the instability was not only confusing users, it was slowing engineering, because features that are hard to model are hard to build and easy to break.
The core of the work was information architecture. Instead of organizing the platform around the company's feature history, I organized it around the questions a community manager actually asks during their day.
The buying process had not changed in a decade. It took five to seven days, entirely offline, and the billing was modeled as a catalog of everything the company had ever shipped. I went through the surveys and sat in on the actual sales calls to find the questions that genuinely mattered, then partnered with the business and sales teams to rebuild the model as hardware-agnostic: a base fee for connecting doors, gates, or units. That single change let us collapse twelve plans into one, and turn a five-to-seven-day offline process into an online self-serve flow that takes minutes.
UX is the total experience of dealing with a company. You cannot redraw your way out of an upstream problem.
Scheduling was the most-used and most-broken part of the platform. The system modeled a schedule as a reusable block of time that could hold up to 70 slots and attach to eight or nine different things. Elegant for engineers, unusable for people. When we tested it, every user failed on their first attempt.
The instinct was to make that powerful model easier to learn. I made the opposite call: throw the model out. Community managers do not think in reusable time-blocks, they think "who can go where, and when." So I rebound scheduling to the group it actually describes, set access times right on the group page, and deleted the entire standalone scheduling section. It removed a whole section of the product and its complexity without losing a single real capability. That is the simplicity worth fighting for: not fewer features, but the same power expressed the way people actually think.
The old dashboard showed useful things alongside noise a manager would never rank as urgent, like release notes and ads. So I asked managers what mattered when they logged in. Two questions came back: "is my community safe?" and "what do I need to act on next?" The redesigned dashboard answered those first: live status and video for doors and gates, notifications for damage or unauthorized entry with clips attached, and a filterable view of upcoming schedules, guests, deliveries, and any device that needed attention.
For residents, the work was about removing friction from the everyday: getting rid of physical keys, letting residents grant access to a guest without having to be there in person, and ending the small daily uncertainty of "did anyone come by while I was out?" Each one took a moment of anxiety or hassle out of living in a managed community.
The last piece was a feedback loop so the platform could keep improving without another ground-up redesign. Working with the customer support team, I found that 75% of support calls were troubleshooting: people calling for guidance that already existed online but could not be found. So I stopped scattering help across the product and made it findable and contextual. I pulled feedback, support, and guidance into one place, and set honest expectations about response times, so the help form stopped being mistaken for a live chatbot.
This project is the clearest example of what I do best: taking a system that has grown into complexity and finding the structure underneath that makes it feel simple. The job is to absorb that complexity so the user never feels the friction it creates.