Enterprise UX · Systems
Modernizing an enterprise automation platform without disrupting critical workflows
Time
|
8-week engagement · 2025
Role
|
Product Designer
Team
|
This Waay UX, Product, Engineering
Context
Why usability and trust matter in a mission-critical enterprise system
JAMS powers automation behind the scenes at large organizations such as—Oracle, Coca Cola Canada, Microsoft SQL Server—where failures are costly and speed matters.
Users rely on the platform daily to monitor jobs, troubleshoot issues, and configure complex workflows—often under time pressure.
JAMS users consistently reported that the platform felt complex and hard to understand. While the system offers powerful automation capabilities, its depth often came at the cost of usability. This project focused on simplifying interactions, clarifying system behavior, and making key workflows easier to navigate—without sacrificing the power advanced users rely on.
Project Brief
This engagement focused on evaluating JAMS’ web and desktop experiences to uncover usability gaps and opportunities for improvement.
Rather than redesigning the platform, the goal was to deliver strategic, actionable recommendations that respect existing workflows while improving clarity, efficiency, and trust.
Strategic Goals
Aligning usability improvements with enterprise reliability and scale
1
Deliver a modern, trustworthy enterprise UX
Refresh visual hierarchy, interaction patterns, and consistency to reinforce JAMS as an enterprise platform.
2
Reduce friction in critical workflow
Identify usability issues that slow down monitoring, troubleshooting, and job creation—especially during high-stakes moments.
Evaluation
We conducted heuristic evaluations and usability reviews across core JAMS workflows, including monitoring, job creation, configuration, and troubleshooting.
This surfaced recurring issues around navigation, system visibility, guidance, and consistency across views.
Key Insights
Why powerful tools alone weren’t enough
While individual tools within JAMS were powerful, users lacked a clear mental model of the platform as a whole.
Focus
Clear system status
Predictable Structure
Guided next steps
Design Approach
We took a phased, systems-first approach, prioritizing clarity and familiarity over novelty.
Rather than sweeping changes, we focused on: High-impact “Quick Wins”
Improved scannability and visibility
Clear separation between configuration and context
Consistent patterns across surfaces
Examples of Quick Wins:
Quick Wins — Monitor
Lack of at-a-glance system awareness
Users cannot quickly understand what jobs are running, failing, or completed without scanning the full table.
Table interactions require unnecessary effort
Pagination defaults are low, pagination state does not persist, and users must repeatedly reorient themselves when navigating away and back.
Failure states are hard to isolate
There is no fast path to view all failed jobs within a recent time window (e.g. last 24 hours).
Quick Wins — Jobs Landing
Navigation friction from layout behavior
Double horizontal scrolling makes browsing jobs unnecessarily difficult.
Pagination limits productivity
Default pagination is capped at 10 rows and does not persist, forcing repeated adjustments.
Creating a new job is not discoverable
“Add new job” is not available by default, requiring users to search for the action.
North Star Vision
Create a cohesive experience where JAMS feels like one system, not a collection of tools. Users should be able to understand system health at a glance, move confidently between tasks, and troubleshoot issues without relying on memory or support.
Monitor Landing
Improve at-a-glance visibility, promoting actionability
Before
The Monitor experience was redesigned to prioritize system awareness at first glance. Key job states, recent failures, and runtime trends are surfaced immediately, allowing users to understand what’s happening now without scanning dense tables. The goal was to shift monitoring from passive observation to fast, confident action.
Home
A unified, guiding jumping-off point
Before
The Home experience acts as a centralized operational overview, bringing together system health, job activity, and frequently used actions in one place. Instead of forcing users to navigate multiple sections to orient themselves, Home provides a clear starting point that supports both quick checks and deeper investigation.
Job Entry View
Leverage AI to make it easier to troubleshoot issues
The Monitor experience was redesigned to prioritize system awareness at first glance. Key job states, recent failures, and runtime trends are surfaced immediately, allowing users to understand what’s happening now without scanning dense tables. The goal was to shift monitoring from passive observation to fast, confident action.
Jobs Landing
Improve job findability
Before
As job libraries scale, discoverability becomes a major pain point. The Jobs Landing experience was redesigned to better support scanning, filtering, and targeted search, making it easier to locate relevant jobs by status, type, or intent. This enables faster navigation and reduces friction in day-to-day job management.
Job Creation
Provide dynamic and relevant job type selection
Job creation was optimized to reduce early-stage decision fatigue. Execution methods are surfaced dynamically through search, recommendations, and contextual descriptions, helping users quickly identify the right job type while maintaining flexibility for advanced workflows.
We introduced AI into job creation to reduce setup friction at the earliest and most error-prone stage of the workflow. Instead of asking users to start from a blank configuration, AI helps translate intent into a strong initial setup by recommending execution methods, common configurations, and sensible defaults.
Job Details: Summary
Surface relevant content making this a true summary page
Before
The summary view was redesigned to highlight the information users need most often: job health, recent failures, run history, dependencies, and upcoming executions. By consolidating these signals into a single view, users can quickly assess the state of a job without navigating across multiple tabs.
Sequence + Diagram View
Reskinning the existing functionality
Before
Complex job logic is difficult to reason about in text alone. We refined the visual structure and hierarchy of the Sequence and Diagram views to make relationships, conditions, and execution paths easier to understand. The updates preserve existing mental models while improving clarity and readability.
Executive Summary
This evaluation identified high-impact UX improvements that can significantly reduce operator friction, improve system confidence, and modernize JAMS’ experience—without requiring a foundational rebuild.