Rebuilding the Admin Experience

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Overhauling Admin at nCino

In 2023, I was tasked with overhauling nCino’s admin space after it had suffered years of neglect and disorganization. The space was an information architecture nightmare; there had never been any leads maintaining it so product teams had no direction on where to slot feature configurations and administrative tools, which made the space very difficult to navigate or even use effectively.

My goal for this project was to reorganize and update the Feature Management space first in order to aid in the overall ease of navigation in Administration, increase feature adoption, and give product teams an assigned space to add their feature configurations.

Personas for this project included external customer administrators and internal developers. It was important to embody both internal and external requirements in the redesign of the admin space in order to maintain full usability.

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The current Admin space is disorganized, poorly labeled, and difficult to navigate. The information architecture needs to be rehauled.
One major driving factor in updating the admin space was to increase feature adoption. Admins were frequently unaware of feature updates due to lack of visibility.
Product teams had regularly been confused about where to add configuration options for features, which led to the initial disorganization of the admin space. A large part of the initiative was to finally give developers an assigned space to place feature configurations.

Final discovery stage post-it board with insights gathered from both internal and external user interviews.

Discovery & Research

The first step towards tackling the redesign effort was to meet with both the administration team and with various internal product teams who had previously contributed feature configurations and tools to the admin space to get a sense of how they were currently using it and how the experience could be improved.

Through my sessions with the administration team I gathered insights into the organizational aspects of the project. I learned about the constant struggle to communicate with other product teams about where to put each new feature configuration, how much of the current administrative experience was either redundant or broken, and the technical limitations of the SalesForce framework.
Meeting with the internal nCino product teams shed light on the other side of the administrative team’s problems. From their perspective, they had no clear direction on where configurations should ultimately be housed but were often under tight deadlines to deliver new features and feature updates and would put the admin work wherever they could in order to adhere to the release schedule. It was always a scramble to get the admin pieces out before the deadline with almost no internal guidance on how they should be built or where they should go.

After establishing the initial requirements with the internal teams, I set up user interviews with several of our customers to understand what external users needed out of a unified admin experience.

External users drove unexpected initiatives like the addition of an Activity Log to track each user’s activity to pinpoint problematic events.
These research sessions also brought to light the need for easy access points into feature documentation; specifically regarding implementation, configuration, and how to use guides. Users were often discouraged when trying to find specific documents in the vast ocean of nCino’s documentation and we had the opportunity to lay exactly what they needed at their feet.

My next step after the discovery stage was to map out the user’s workflow through the product. Working together closely with my PM, I decided on three workflows for the major use cases; enabling a feature, implementing available updates, and accessing feature pages.

Laying the workflows out in plain view helped me visualize the framework for the new admin experience. What had originally appeared to be a jumbled mess of various feature configuration options and functionality came together in a neat, organized flow.

Workflows & Wireframes

Insights Gathered

Challenges

Density of Information
Due to the number of available features and all their possible configuration options, there was a large quantity of data to display across admin.

Duplicate Features
After the implementation of Feature Versions, all installed versions of a Feature needed to be represented in the Feature List, leading to duplicate Feature names with different version numbers.

No Established Patterns
Admin was not built on any sort of informational or navigational framework, meaning it contained a number of clashing patterns that users had simply gotten used to over time.

Feature List Sketches

Enabling a Feature Workflow

Feature Page Functionality Workflow

I brought my sketches and wireframes to users to evaluate which direction would best suit their needs.

Implementing Available Updates Workflow

Feature List Wireframe

The Final Admin Experience

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more.

From the main Feature List users could access an overlay panel that offered them a view into the Sub Features, Processes, and Dependencies associated with that Feature. The Feature Pages were also accessed via the overlay panel.

For the main Feature Page, I decided on a simple alphabetically arranged vertical list with a search function to easily locate and implement features. Each Feature Card in the list offered further access to individual Feature Pages where further functionality was housed.

Additional functionality was added to the Feature List in order to keep track of available Feature Updates and actions previously executed

The Feature Page itself was the most critical addition to the overhaul. Previously all Feature configuration settings had been placed individually in the main admin space, creating a disorganized and confusing space.

The Feature Page allowed both admin users and developers a more complete view of each Feature.

Conclusion

The reorganization of the nCino administrative space was a huge success, opening up new opportunities for Feature configuration both internally and externally.