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edays
Admin Panel Redesign
The admin panel is where edays clients configure everything — absence rules, permissions, compliance settings. It's also where they spend the most time and encounter the most friction. Extensive user research revealed one consistent insight: users want to get in, find what they need, and get out. That became the north star for the entire redesign.
Role
Product & Design Director
Timeline
2023-2024
Team
4 devs, 2 testers
The Problem
edays serves global clients with complex compliance requirements. The system is powerful, but navigating it was painful — a 90s-style top bar with hyperlink-dense hover dropdowns, no search functionality, no breadcrumbs, and a three-level settings hierarchy that the interface completely obscured.
Users would get lost in the system with no way to orient themselves. Save buttons sat at the bottom of long pages, often below the fold and difficult to find. Admin users who only logged in occasionally would forget how it worked between sessions.
Legacy interface 1
Navigation & Search
Navigation moved from a cramped top bar to a proper sidebar — scrollable, logically grouped, collapsible to give users more space on complex screens, with room to grow. The three-level hierarchy became visible and consistent, with breadcrumbs throughout so users always know where they are.
Search was the bigger win. Previously there was none — users had to know which page contained a setting, navigate there, then Ctrl+F. We built comprehensive search with filtered tabs, direct navigation, and auto-scroll that highlights exactly what you're looking for.
New navigation 1
AI Help Bot
This was the first AI feature we owned internally. A team member wrote an 80,000-word knowledge base covering every function in the admin panel — he's the MVP on this one.
That document was vectorised and made searchable via OpenAI through Azure. Users can ask questions about features, get the settings hierarchy explained, or be guided directly to what they're looking for. Adoption has grown steadily and now sits above 60% — proof of how essential inline help is for a system as complex as edays.
AI Help Bot
The Delivery
An offshore team had spent eighteen months rebuilding the admin panel from scratch. Progress had been made, but we were still looking at another twelve months to deliver. We considered shipping what we had, but users would have had to switch between old and new admin — an awful experience. And with no roadmap space to finish the job, it would stay that way indefinitely. After stepping into the director role, I made the call to cancel that project and pivot to modernising what already existed. Five months later we were live, core problems solved, and the team was free to progress with the rest of the roadmap.
Delivery 1
Results
Client feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Navigation complaints dropped significantly, and the AI bot adoption climbing past 60% exceeded all expectations for a help feature. The project demonstrated what happens when you make the right strategic call for the situation — an internal team delivered in five months what an offshore team couldn't in eighteen.