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Redesigning an internal tool to improve operational efficiency and scalability

Role: UX Designer

 

Methods: workflow analysis, information architecture, and collaborative design iteration

​Context: Internal platform (confidential)

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The Context

At Locaweb, the Migration Team is responsible for handling customer requests to migrate websites and email services from external servers to the company’s infrastructure.

This process is a critical moment in the customer journey: clients often decide to migrate when seeking better service quality, and a smooth, efficient migration experience plays a key role in customer retention.

The internal migration platform already existed, but it had limited features and a non-intuitive interface, which slowed down operations and made it difficult for the team to scale.

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The platform served two distinct user profiles:

  • the Internal Migration Team, responsible for executing and managing migrations

  • Clients, who submitted migration requests, provided credentials, tracked progress, and validated results

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The project focused on improving operational clarity, efficiency, and scalability, while also ensuring clients had clear visibility into the migration status throughout the process.

The Problem

The main challenge was operational efficiency.

The Migration Team struggled with:

  • Poor visibility into ongoing and past migrations

  • Difficulty accessing critical information related to each request

  • Lack of centralized reporting to track workload and progress

As a result, the team spent unnecessary time searching for data, manually checking server information, and coordinating migration steps, making it harder to scale operations as demand increased.

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Scope & Confidentiality

This project involved redesigning and expanding an internal operational platform.

Due to confidentiality:

  • Internal screens, prototypes, and detailed flows cannot be displayed

  • The case focuses on decision-making, process, and impact, rather than UI

This approach reflects how internal tools are often designed and evaluated in real product environments.

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Internal Migration Platform

My Role

I worked as the sole designer on the evolution of the migration platform, collaborating closely with:

  • One developer

  • One representative from the Migration Team

My responsibilities included:

  • Redesigning the migration request and execution flows for the internal team

  • Designing how migration history, reports, and operational data would be structured and displayed

  • Designing UX solutions that connected internal execution with client-facing communication

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All UX decisions were made collaboratively, balancing user needs with technical constraints.

Process

To understand the team’s needs and pain points, I conducted interviews with migration agents and closely analyzed their daily workflows.
The focus was on:

  • Identifying information that was critical but hard to access

  • Understanding how agents tracked progress and identified issues

  • Mapping where time was lost due to lack of visibility or organization

These insights guided the redesign of the internal flows, information architecture, and data presentation.

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Key Design Decisions

1. Migration history as a first-class feature
Previously, there was no structured way to view the history of actions performed within each migration request.
Although the data existed, it was stored at a low system level and was costly and time-consuming to retrieve.
Based on input from migration agents, I designed:

  • A structured migration history view

  • Clear grouping of the most relevant actions and events

  • Faster access to critical information directly from the platform

This significantly reduced the effort required to understand the status and past actions of a migration.
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2. Operational reporting and real-time visibility
The Migration Team lacked any visual overview of their workload and performance.
To address this, I designed a reporting view that allowed agents to track:

  • Total number of migration requests

  • Requests by type (email, website, database)

  • Current status (pending, in progress, completed)

This gave the team real-time visibility into operations and made it easier to distribute work and identify bottlenecks.
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3. Managing complexity through clarity (key trade-off)
The migration execution flow remained inherently complex due to:

  • Technical dependencies

  • Required inputs from customers

  • The nature of server migrations

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Instead of attempting to oversimplify the process, we made a deliberate trade-off to preserve necessary complexity but improve clarity through well-defined stages, clear naming and visible status labels.

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While the internal team required detailed statuses, the clients needed a simplified way to track migration progress.​

Instead of exposing the same data to both personas:

  • Internal users had access to granular operational statuses

  • Clients saw simplified states such as Pending, In progress, and Completed

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This separation ensured clarity for each audience without increasing cognitive load.

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Below is a snapshot of the core problem, key UX decisions, and their impact on the migration team’s efficiency and scalability.

Impact

Although no formal metrics were available, qualitative feedback from the Migration Team indicated:

  • Faster progression through migration requests

  • Reduced time spent searching for information

  • Greater confidence when handling complex migrations

The improved internal experience enabled the team to work more efficiently and respond faster to issues, ultimately contributing to a smoother migration experience for customers.

Clients benefited from clearer status updates and more transparent communication, reducing uncertainty during a high-stakes process.

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Learnings

This project reinforced how internal platforms can have a direct impact on customer experience, even when customers never interact with the internal interface itself.

Designing for multiple user profiles within the same product requires:

  • Clear separation of concerns

  • Careful definition of what information each user truly needs

  • Strong alignment between internal execution and external communication

Improving the internal migration platform increased operational efficiency while supporting a smoother, more reliable migration experience for clients — a key factor in customer trust and retention.

Why This Project Matters

This case demonstrates my ability to:

  • Design for complex internal workflows

  • Design for products with multiple user profiles

  • Collaborate closely with technical and operational teams

  • Make conscious trade-offs between simplicity and feasibility

  • Translate operational needs into clear, usable product experiences

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