01 · Flagship Case Study

From Nested Modals to Confident Maintenance Workflows

Helixintel’s enterprise insurance clients were losing confidence in the platform. The screen doing the damage was the most-used one in the product: the work order. It felt untrustworthy. I led a year-long redesign that replaced a nested-modal labyrinth with a role-zoned full-page experience. Trust returned. Tickets dropped 90%.

Role: Lead Product Designer
Company: Helixintel
Year: 2024
Focus: Research Leadership · Enterprise SaaS · IA & Systems

A year of design work, in one image. 60% fewer abandoned tasks. 90% fewer support tickets. 100K+ users served.

The problem

The work order was a modal with modals nested inside it. Creation fields, comments, checklists, and time tracking all crammed into one space. Save state was ambiguous, so users hesitated, repeated actions, or just abandoned what they were doing. Sometimes they lost hours of work.

Customer Service was drowning in tickets that weren’t about broken functionality. They were about an interface that felt untrustworthy. For enterprise insurance clients whose risk and compliance teams depend on accurate maintenance records, that uncertainty eroded confidence in the platform itself.

The actual shipped product. Three nested dialogs, three close buttons, no save indicator.

Research & approach

01 Ran qualitative research with 10 users across creator and technician roles, recruiting participants with recent work order activity so we’d hit the real moments of uncertainty, not the hypothetical ones.
02 Used the findings to make the case for a year-long overhaul instead of another round of patch fixes. 62% were uncertain on save states. 58% struggled with navigation. 45% preferred full-page layouts for complex work orders. The data made the argument. Leadership committed the resources.
03 Ran journey-mapping workshops with Product, Engineering, and Customer Service. The goal wasn’t a deliverable. It was cross-functional alignment on the handoff moments where creators couldn’t confirm assignments and technicians lost context.
04 Designed the full-page layout. Clear section hierarchy, visible save feedback, predictable action placement. Creation separated from collaboration. Activity given its own zone.
05 Negotiated a beta program with anchor enterprise customers to validate the patterns in production before broader rollout. Ran mixed-role usability testing to refine action visibility and keep secondary features within reach without letting them crowd the primary workflow.

Decision traceability map with three rows. Save-state confusion (62% uncertain) traces to explicit save confirmation traces to 90% drop in support tickets. Modal nesting traces to role-zoned full-page layout traces to 60% drop in task abandonment. Lost context on role handoffs traces to a timestamped activity zone traces to 'Trust restored' cited by enterprise insurance customers in compliance audits. — Every shipped change traces back to a research signal. Every metric traces back to a deliberate call.

The solution

I replaced the nested modal with a full-page work order that gave each workflow room to breathe. Information is organized by role: core creation details for task initiators, collaboration features for field technicians, an activity stream for coordinators. Every state change shows explicit feedback. Every role can follow the story of a work order without hunting through layers.

Strategic mode separation

Creation and collaboration each get their own zone. Related records, checklists, and the activity stream don’t compete for the same space anymore. That’s where the support tickets came from.

Page schematic showing the three role zones of the new work order: Creation, Activity, and Collaboration, with annotation lines connecting each zone to its audience — Three zones, three audiences. Each role gets its own space.

Filled work order WO#1111 with priority, assigned team avatars, an inspection checklist 50% complete, related equipment and location, attachments, and an activity feed of real team comments. — The filled state. Three zones populated with real maintenance work.

Empty state of the redesigned work order WO#1111. KPI strip across the top, three role zones below with clear add-content CTAs for Inspection Checklist, Related Records, and Attachments. — The same zones, empty. Each role sees where their work goes before it starts.

Trust-building system feedback

Every save and status change now shows visible confirmation. The system answers back. That’s the difference between a tool people trust and a tool they ping support about.

Grid of four interactions (save, status change, reassign, checklist) shown before and after the redesign. Silent uncertainty on the left, explicit emerald confirmations on the right. — Silence felt untrustworthy. Explicit confirmation feels like control.

The redesigned Upload Attachments modal with a drop zone and a list of uploaded files showing names and sizes. — Upload. The dropped file shows up immediately, named and sized.

The redesigned Add Checklist modal with focused fields for name, description, items, assignees, and due date — the simplified flow that replaced nested modals. — Add Checklist. One focused modal where there used to be nested layers.

Role-optimized information architecture

Empty states walk new users through clear next steps. Filled states surface the full hierarchy: location, equipment, parts, technician assignments, audit trail. Creators capture the essentials. Technicians get straight to execution. Neither role has to translate the other’s view.

Three-column diagram showing how the same work order page prioritizes different first fields per role: Task Creator sees Title, Priority, Assign; Field Technician sees Checklist, Location, Parts; Coordinator sees Activity, Status, Audit Trail — Same page, different first three fields per role. Nobody has to translate.

The simplified Copy Work Order modal with title, priority, due date, group, maintenance type, category, description, and assign-to fields in a single focused dialog. — Copy Work Order. The creator’s critical fields, on one screen, where three used to live.

60% Drop in task abandonment

90% Drop in support tickets on work-order flows

100K+ Users served across insurance & property management

Team & leadership impact

Led: Lead Product Designer at Helixintel, end-to-end on the work order overhaul
Partnered with: VP of Customer Success, Product Director, Customer Service leadership, enterprise insurance partners, engineering on implementation

The patterns we shipped here became the contribution model the team uses for new surfaces in the broader CMMS overhaul. Beyond the metrics, the lasting effect was structural. The work order is no longer a conversation about “is this saved?” in standups or support queues. It’s a stable foundation the rest of the product builds on.

What I’d do differently

We deferred bulk-action workflows to phase 2 to keep the initial scope manageable. Customers asked for them loudly within the first month. If I were running it back I’d ship bulk actions in phase 1 and trade off a less polished empty state. Filled state is where 95% of usage lives. That’s where investment should go first.

Three nested dialogs collapsed into one role-zoned page, and 90% of the work-order support tickets that had been dogging the team went with them.