Microsoft - CALM
Role
Lead UX/UI Designer
Timeline
3 years, 2 phases
Tools
Figma, FigJam, Notion, Jira
Client
Microsoft & Compass Group
Scale
50,000+ Employees
The Problem
"Every team tracked their assets. Nobody tracked what happened between teams."
Microsoft and Compass employees weren't careless. They had spreadsheets, processes, and people responsible for keeping things updated. But when a laptop moved from IT to a new hire, from a new hire to storage — that journey lived nowhere. Five separate teams managed assets independently with no shared record or approval process.
50k+
Microsoft and Compass employees — and the assets moving between them — with no unified view
5
Separate teams managing assets independently, with no shared record or approval process
0
Automatic trail of who had what, when, and what happened to it
What Made This Hard
Different people needed to see completely different things
An IT manager overseeing the whole system needs to see everything — every device, every person, every status change. A regular employee just needs to know what's assigned to them. The challenge was building one platform that felt purposeful for both.
Too much information on screen — and none of it could be missed
When you're looking at hundreds of devices, you can't read every line. The design had to answer three questions instantly per row: is this device available? is something wrong? does it need action? We redesigned the tag system more times than I'd like to admit.
Five teams, five different ways of doing the same thing
Each team had its own process for requesting, approving, and receiving equipment. Designing a system flexible enough to handle all of that — without making it feel like five systems stitched together — was the hardest design problem in the project.
Asset Lifecycle
Before designing anything, we needed a shared answer: what are all the states a device can be in? Getting this agreed on early meant every screen, every status tag, every notification had something solid to stand on.
Acquired
Registered and logged
Available
Ready to be given out
Assigned
With an employee
In Repair
Being fixed or renewed
Incident
Lost, stolen, or damaged
Retired
Out of circulation
Design Decision
A summary dashboard
Charts, totals, recent activity. Useful for a manager checking in once a week — but it meant daily users had to click past it just to get to their actual work.
The full device list
The most common task — finding a specific device and doing something with it — works with zero extra steps. Summaries are still there, just not in the way. Designed for the person who opens this ten times a day.
The approvals queue
Good for teams who spend most of their time processing requests. But not universal — most people in the system aren't approvers. This would have felt wrong for the majority.
Key Screens
Asset Registry
The device list — where most people spend most of their time
Every device in the organization, searchable and filterable in seconds. Each row tells you what the device is, where it is in its life, and whether it needs attention — without opening it.
Lifecycle Approval Workflow
Approvals that don't require a chain of emails
When a device needs to be renewed, repaired, or reassigned, the right people are notified automatically — in the right order. No back-and-forth, no lost threads, no one wondering where things stand.
Workflow Builder
Building approval flows without writing a single line of code
Each team had a different approval process. We built a visual tool that lets the right people configure their own flows — who approves what, in what order. The first version was too complicated. We simplified it. Then simplified it again.
Outcomes
~70%
Less time spent manually tracking down device status each week
100%
Of every device's history logged, timestamped, and audit-ready
0
Manual steps needed to notify the right people when something changes
Learnings
Get the structure right before touching the visuals
The most important work happened before any screen was designed — agreeing on what states a device could be in, and what each one meant. That clarity made every downstream decision faster and cleaner.
Think in permissions, not personas
I started asking what does each person need? Good question, wrong starting point. The more useful question was what is each person actually allowed to see and do? Smaller shift — completely different design outcomes.
Predictability is underrated
When someone uses a platform every day, they build habits fast. A button that moves, a tag that means something different on another page — small things that add up to a lot of frustration. Worth being annoying about.
What I'd do differently
I'd get the workflow builder in front of someone completely new to it much earlier. We tested with stakeholders who'd been in every meeting — they couldn't see the gaps. Real users don't have that context.
Next project
Microsoft - DISH