case study

Technician Picker

As part of an enterprise-scale facilities management platform, I led the UX design for a role-sensitive work order experience, focusing on simplifying task intake, dispatch logic, and technician workflow clarity across multiple user types (frontline staff, operations managers, and external vendors).

It’s designed to streamline how tenants, building engineers, and facility managers create, assign, track, and complete work orders for building issues — like HVAC, lighting, plumbing, cleaning, or inspections.

Problem Statement

In the existing technician picker dropdown, users often struggled to identify the correct person because many technicians had similar or identical names. This led to frequent re-selection, delays, and frustration in workflows that relied on accurate technician assignment.

The original tree-view structure introduced both usability friction and performance issues. As part of this redesign, also collaborated closely with engineering to simplify the component structure and improve rendering efficiency at scale.

The goal is to surface key identifiers—such as ID, phone number, and email—to make selection more intuitive, while also redesigning the component as a scalable, reusable pattern that supports consistency and future expansion across the platform.

UX Key Findings

Through user feedback and platform analysis, several usability issues were identified in the current Technician Picker experience, particularly for external account users if the structure is defined by internal users:

  • Terminology Misalignment
    The technician picker was originally designed for internal users, using terms and structures that confused external users. The tree view categories and labels lacked relevance and clarity.

  • Insufficient Context in Dropdown Items
    Users couldn’t reliably identify the right technician due to missing key details like ID, phone number, and email. They often searched by ID, which wasn’t supported in the current design.

  • Poor Differentiation of Results

    • Preferred vs. No Preference technicians weren’t visually distinguished.

    • Showing the whole category path of technicians adds clutter without improving clarity.

    • Parent categories were visually inconsistent and hard to interpret.

  • Ambiguous Metadata
    Numbers shown in parentheses next to technician names were unclear—users assumed they were phone numbers, internal IDs, or something else entirely.

  • Unnecessary Account Info for Most Users
    Since most users support only one account, displaying account names added noise without value.

Design Metric:

  • Efficiency

  • Accuracy

  • Visual hireachy

Design exploration

List out all information we are presented to the users.

Distinguish information importance and attributes

Build clear visual hierarchy to remove the clutters with design system components

  • List of information we have to display on each item:

    Previous:

    • Technician type

    • Technician name

    • Email

    • Phone number

    • Location

    • Address

    • Account

    • Qualified or not

      • + Unqualified reason

    • Preferred or not

    • Technician availability (after selected)

  • New:

    • + ID

    • + Potential contextual information for internal users