About a year later, we decided to revisit the Tool Configurator. By talking with our users, we discovered that the settings for each tool were not organized well. Some settings were surfaced to make them more accessible, while other settings were placed in an “Advanced Settings” menu. The logic behind this was to try to make more regularly used settings easier to find and tuck away less used settings. Unfortunately, it just made settings harder to find. To fix this, I redesigned the Tool Configurator with tabs and reorganized the settings moving all surfaced settings and Advanced Settings and putting them into more logical groupings. Feedback from some user research calls confirmed this new design is easier to use. Further, even experienced users started discovering settings they didn’t know existed.

While in the middle of implementing these changes, one of our front-end developers left the company. I used this opportunity to start taking on some developer tasks. I fixed a few styling issues Sass and some functionality bugs in React.

I wrote a blog post about the second Tool Configurator update. You can read it here.