Kellen is a NYC-based Product DesignerDesign Strategist bringing clarity to complex digital products.

Challenge

Features

Bringing clarity to required customer actions

Business-critical tasks were not only split across multiple pages, but users lacked clear context around what was required to close their books. Customers often relied on external tools like spreadsheets to track and prioritize tasks for individual locations. Without a clear system inside the product, they risked submitting incomplete information, which could delay closing books across all locations. These challenges only worsened as the number of locations increased.

I proposed consolidating those pages into a single unified experience, since they represented two parts of the same workflow. I designed a new home page that brought both parts of the process into one place, allowing users to complete required actions without moving between screens. Tasks were grouped by what they accomplish, helping users prioritize based on business impact or speed of completion. A location filter further improved that prioritization by allowing customers to focus on specific locations instead of managing everything at once.

Streamlining business-critical customer input

Prior interviews had already surfaced major friction in the transaction categorization workflow, which lived on a page called Transactions to Code. Beyond missing context, the interface was bloated and difficult to navigate. Transactions were displayed as single-line table rows that required users to categorize, add details, and leave comments all in the same row, which extended beyond the screen width. The comment workflow was especially unintuitive, which often led to important clarifying details never being submitted.

While the home page addressed broader contextual gaps, the categorization experience still required significant improvement. I redesigned the workflow around a drawer that opened detailed transaction information without taking users away from the main page. This provided more space for a clear visual hierarchy and allowed the process to guide users step by step.

I also simplified the copy into plain language to make the process more accessible for users with less accounting experience. At the same time, I advocated for flexibility for power users through a feature called Accountant Mode. By default, the Chart of Accounts was grouped into guided categories to support less experienced users. When Accountant Mode was enabled, those groupings were removed, allowing experienced users to navigate directly to specific accounts.

Boosting engagement for higher location customers

When analyzing session data, I noticed that customers who regularly used analytics and reporting tools logged in more frequently and stayed more current on required action items. Many higher-location customers, however, were not using those features, which led to fewer logins and a buildup of unresolved tasks.

To increase engagement, I focused on two improvements. First, I introduced more flexible reporting filters. Previously, users could only view data for a single location or all locations combined. For customers managing many locations, viewing everything at once was often too broad to be useful. I added the ability to view subsets of locations, enabling more actionable analysis.

Second, I surfaced high-value data points through clearer data visualization. By identifying which metrics active users relied on most, I prioritized those insights and made them easier to digest. The goal was to increase the value of logging in, encourage more frequent engagement, and indirectly drive better completion of required bookkeeping tasks.

Conclusion

Challenge

Features

Building the backbone for our internal teams

Customer information was fragmented across more than five tools and products, spanning both internal systems and third-party platforms. Customer-facing teams had to constantly switch between applications to piece together a single customer’s status. This reliance on disconnected tools led to inconsistent handoffs, duplicated effort, and slow ticket resolution.

To address this, I introduced Support Console, a foundational feature designed to serve as a central hub for customer information. It consolidated the most critical data from internal tools and external systems into a single touchpoint, while still providing quick access to less frequently used details. Early prototypes tested with the support team confirmed that this feature alone would lead to faster ticket preparation and fewer breakdowns during handoffs.

Optimizing our support ticket system for scale

After shipping several internal features that reduced support response times and improved integration uptime, a new issue surfaced on the customer side. We received significant feedback from our customers managing large numbers of locations that they were being overwhelmed by the volume and frequency of requests coming from our team. While many of the requests were necessary to keep our accounting processes and integrations unblocked, the way they were presented created unnecessary friction and slowed overall progress. Addressing this required changes to the customer-facing application, supported by new internal features.

Through my own analysis and customer feedback, I learned customers lacked clear actionable context around what was required of them and how each request related to their accounting processes. To address this, I designed a custom support ticketing system called Blockers. Internally, Blockers functions as a full-featured ticketing system comparable to Zendesk, but is natively integrated into our internal tools. Externally, it presents customers’ action items in process-targeted segments. This reduces cognitive load for customers, helps them prioritize their responses, and ultimately improved turnaround times without increasing support overhead.

Stabilizing our internal source of truth

While reviewing onboarding and support tickets that were progressing slowly, we identified a lack of consistency regarding who was responsible for customers and their locations. Some relationships between customers and internal users existed to begin the onboarding process, but the majority of customers and location data was managed in Salesforce and Excel spreadsheets. These sources were slow to update and easily mismanaged, especially as employees changed roles or locations were transferred.

To prevent customer processes being lost, I designed a tool to manage these relationships within our own system, with support for bulk reassigning. I partnered with the engineering director in a whiteboarding session to explore different ways to tackle this feature. The final design is built around 2 sections: a customer table and a tabbed sidebar of internal user cards. Selecting a card will filter the table to show their associated customers, enabling teams to quickly reassign large groups of accounts in response to workload shifts or employee turnover. This same UI would then later be used to create a tool for assigning specific locations to internal users.

Challenge

The New York Public Library mobile app offers a wide range of features, but lacks clear prioritization of core user workflows. The experience feels more like a collection of features than a cohesive product, making common tasks harder to complete than they should be.

As a frequent user, I often found myself moving through multiple screens to complete simple actions, or defaulting to the website instead. This highlighted an opportunity to create a more intuitive, workflow-driven experience that not only supports key user needs like borrowing and managing media, but also encourages deeper exploration of everything the library has to offer.

Approach

I began by mapping a simplified information architecture and defining the core workflows for the app. From there, I designed an initial homepage and outlined a lightweight product requirements document to clarify scope and direction.

The redesign centers on media borrowing as the primary workflow, with supporting improvements to renewal, discovery, and saving items for later. I also introduced functionality that was available on the web, but missing from the app, such as the ability to save media for future access. At the same time, I left out ideas that depended on structural changes to the library’s current data model, such as directly linking from blog content to catalog entries.

After generating initial concepts in Figma, I refined the designs through multiple iterations and built a coded prototype to validate interactions and feasibility, using Codex to help manage complexity and move through development more quickly.

What Changed

The existing app greeted users with links to features, but did little to prioritize what most people were there to do. In the redesign, the homepage shifts from a directory-style entry point to a workflow-driven one, bringing the most important actions to the surface and making the experience feel more personal and immediately useful.

Checkouts, holds, and saved media are now accessible from the main page rather than buried behind multiple layers of navigation. Because borrowing and managing media are the core services most users associate with the library, I treated them as the primary workflow and made them easier to access and manage.

Saved media is newly introduced to the mobile experience, bringing in functionality that was previously available on the web but missing from the app. Saving items creates a simpler way to keep track of books and makes it easier for users to return to titles they are considering before requesting them.

I also improved the visibility of actions tied to borrowed and saved media. Requesting, holding, and canceling actions are now presented more clearly based on the context in which an item is being viewed, reducing confusion and helping prevent dead-end actions, like attempting to request a book that is already checked out.

Discovery was also expanded beyond just searching. In the current app, users are expected to know what they are looking for before they can find anything. The redesign introduces more opportunities to surface recommendations and NYPL editorial content, making it easier for users to explore books through themes like “Women Who Shaped NYC,” rather than only through direct search.

Decisions + Trade-Offs

Because this was an exploratory redesign, I focused on changes that could make a real impact without depending on an overhaul of the library’s existing systems. I chose to center borrowing and media management because they are the most immediate tasks for many users and the clearest place to improve usability. At the same time, I wanted the app to support more open-ended exploration, not just direct search, which led me to surface recommendations and editorial content in ways that encourage browsing. Some ideas depended on a deeper level of catalog integration than the current system could support, so I left those out rather than force solutions that felt unrealistic.

Conclusion

This redesign was centered on the simple product goal of making the app more useful from the moment a user opens it. That meant prioritizing the workflows people return to most, reducing unnecessary steps, and creating more room for discovery without losing sight of the constraints of the existing system.