Enterprise UX / Azure Process

Service Tree:
Moving a Service

A process-change story. I introduced a time-boxed design-sprint model to a fast-moving Azure team that had been shipping without research—then redesigned Service Tree's service-migration flow to prove the new way of working delivered.

Role
Lead UX Designer
Team
Service Tree Product & Dev Partners
Type
Design Process & Workflow Redesign

Overview

Maintaining the source of truth

Service Tree is Microsoft's master directory. It contains the source of truth for the metadata behind every internal service. Keeping that metadata accurate is critical. During re-orgs and platform changes, service owners must handle migrating services manually to stay up-to-date.

The Challenge

Following a major internal re-org, Service Tree's ownership transitioned to our team charter. I partnered with the Product team to help solve key usability pain points, while pursuing a strategic goal of elevating the team's overall design maturity.

The team's maturity level was rated as "Emergent" based on Nielsen Norman's 6 stages of UX maturity.

The Process Change

Standardizing a fast-paced sprint model

Historically, the team lacked confidence in UX timelines, frequently skipping vital user research and design validation to meet aggressive shipping dates. To repair trust and fit design activities to the team's rapid pace, I introduced a streamlined engagement timeline modeled on Jake Knapp's Design Sprint methodology.

This time-boxed structure fostered close collaboration with PMs and developers, providing validated user feedback in days instead of weeks, and establishing design quality without sacrificing deployment speed.

Design-led sprint — research & validation built in Sprint Model
Days 1–4
Plan interviews, talk with customers & synthesize
  • Intake project
  • Discuss user-centric activities
  • Plan research
  • Coach PM
Days 5–8
Iterate over UX, then validate with customers
  • Design iterations
  • Create flows
  • Create validation study
  • Synthesize findings
  • Internal team review
Days 9 & 10
Update UX and get ready for handoff
  • Design updates
  • Usability testing
  • Dev handoff
Past Process Ad-hoc — research & validation often skipped
Days 1 & 2
Learn & ask questions
  • Intake project
  • Design iterations
Days 3–8
Iterate over UI
  • Internal team review of UI
  • Make UI updates
Days 9 & 10
Iterate over UI
  • Dev handoff

Drag to compare the past process with the new sprint model

Project Goals

Aligning business and UX goals

Business
Create a simple, self-service experience to easily 'move a service'. Previously, Product Managers spent hours every week manually assisting engineering teams with migrations.

Eliminate stale ownership data and confusion surrounding service handoffs.
UX
Design an interface directly informed by validated user feedback.

Validate core assumptions in short cycles and build a strong partnership with Product stakeholders.

Validation & Testing

Co-designing with service owners

Partnering with a User Researcher, we conducted two testing sessions with active service owners. The first session collected feedback on early wireframes and concept models. The second session validated the final visual designs in a comparative study. We successfully iterated and finalized the user flow within a single week. 3 out of 3 users agreed that the redesigned wizard was a massive improvement over the legacy tool.

“This is fantastic. I want to thank you so much for reaching out sharing early with me and giving me an opportunity to help shape the future here. This is tremendous. I really do think this is going to help a lot of the folks like me across Microsoft.”

— Service Owner @ Microsoft
Testing click-through

The Designs · What the Process Produced

Minimizing overhead and migration errors

The redesign below is the output of that sprint process—evidence that faster cycles still produced rigorous, validated work. I reworked the migration wizard to eliminate configuration mistakes and improve discoverability across three core areas:

Discoverable entry points
The previous entry point to initiate a move was nested 3 clicks deep inside a secondary accordion tab. Many internal support questions boiled down to "How do I move my service?". I created two prominent entry points: one on the service's landing page and one within its metadata editor, aligning with how developers search for settings.
Discoverable entry point — service landing page
Discoverable entry point — service metadata editor
Validating stale ownership
Identifying service owners was a major friction point. Inactive owners (caused by departures or re-orgs) resulted in migration failures. Previously, users had to manually check user directories. I added an inline verification step that highlights active/inactive owners automatically and suggests add/remove actions.
Inline owner validation — active and inactive owners highlighted with suggested add/remove actions
Reducing failure rates through step-by-step wizard
Generic system errors used to leave developers stranded during migrations. I broke the flow into 3 simple, validated steps: (1) Select the new destination parent node, (2) Validate and update owners, and (3) Review and confirm the changes. This allowed us to validate inputs at each step and surface contextual warnings.
Step-by-step migration wizard — validated three-step flow with contextual warnings

Post Deployment

UX maturity and efficiency outcomes

Following deployment, the redesigned migration flow succeeded in making service moves a self-service task and established a higher maturity for design engagement:

Emergent → Structured
Moved the team up Nielsen Norman's UX-maturity scale—from skipping research to a structured sprint process with early, validated user involvement.
50%
Reduction in time Product Managers spent manually troubleshooting service moves, once the redesigned flow shipped.

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