Box provides cloud content-management solutions that let customers securely store, manage, and share content with people inside and outside their organization.

Box has two main facets: the consumer app, which people use to store and manage their files, and the Admin Console, which gives IT admins comprehensive controls to add, edit, and remove users, configure the right settings and permissions, and run audit reports. Along with two other designers, I own the design of the Admin Console — and here I led the redesign of its User Management tool.

The User Management tool is the primary place for admins to add, edit, remove, and set up users with the right permissions and features across the company.

The tool was built 6 years ago, with features constantly bolted on and band-aid fixes layered over time. The number of issues and the tech debt had reached a critical mass — so we decided both the backend architecture and the user experience needed a complete overhaul.

The Box Admin has 5 key personas we design for — IT Admin, Legal, Security Admin, Group Admin, and Helpdesk agent. The User Management tool is used primarily by one: the IT Admin.

Talking to IT Admins for this project, I identified 3 sub-personas with distinct, specific goals and needs.

In the existing experience, admins viewed and edited information on the same page. But the data told a clearer story: admins were viewing 60% of the time and editing only 20%.

Using that insight, I split the experience into two distinct modes — View and Edit.

View — A cleaner UI where admins can scan information without being overloaded by functionality — and without worrying about accidentally updating a user's settings.

Edit — A dedicated mode for the times admins actually need to update information, with focused, contextual controls.

Before — The stacked view of info was not easily scannable, and information hard to parse. Some important information that admins would like was missing. Other attributes were either not useful or misleading.

After — In the new dashboard, I updated the UI using Box design system and patterns. Reprioritized the attributes to be shown based on user input and usage analytics.

Filter & sort users

Sort and filter were the least discoverable and most problematic feature in the study — jumbled together, with a "Filter by groups" section that listed every group in the enterprise (often thousands), rendering it unusable. I:

• Offered sorting via table headers — a familiar, discoverable pattern.
• Removed "filter by groups" — admins looking for a group's users use the dedicated Groups tab, which has more robust functionality.
• Cut the excess to greatly simplify what remained.

Before: admins faced one long page — a giant wall of information, permissions, and settings — that was hard to scan and heavy on cognitive load.

After: Information and permissions are chunked into card modules that expand and collapse on demand — easier to parse, with far less scrolling.

View role & access permissions

Before: the critical co-admin setting was buried, bunched together with member settings, and hardly visible.

After: a dedicated attribute highlights the user's role — member, co-admin, or admin — and permissions sit under separate headers so co-admin and member permissions are easy to tell apart.

In the old UI, view and edit actions were conflated on the same page — user details were interspersed with edit controls, making information hard to scan and raising the odds of accidental changes.

Before— In the UI today, view and edit actions are conflated together on the same page. This made it really hard to scan information as all user details were interspersed with edit actions. This also increased chances of accidentally updating information.

V1— With a goal of focussed attention, I created two separate modes– View and Edit. In the first iteration, the Edit mode was a singular page where the Admin could edit any user setting or details.

Final design— Testing V1 in user interviews, I learnt that all the settings in one page felt like an overload of information. Admins usually update one or two pieces of information for a user and don't always need to see everything together. I used this insight to create separate edit flows for different user journeys. This design decision was helpful in 2 ways–
1. Since the user only saw a few related settings at once, I could provide more context about what each setting meant.
2. Decreased overall eng complexity.

Because the redesign shipped on a shifting timeline, I defined success up front around three measurable outcomes:

This was a major ground-up redesign — a lot of research, usability testing, and UX compromises throughout. As much as I'd have liked it to launch on time, shifting priorities and engineering-resource constraints pushed the timeline to an April launch.