What do you mean it was never submitted?
So what
People thought they’d submitted records they never had. That was one of many pains in two enterprise apps used by 2,000+ people across the national lab system. With a strict budget and borrowed developers, I ranked the backlog by user pain and shipped the smallest fix for each. Abandoned records went from hundreds a year to nearly zero.
At a glance
- Role
- Product Manager & Software Engineer at Idaho National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy national lab
- Team
- me, borrowed developers and a co-worker on the help content, for 2,000+ researchers, reviewers and compliance stakeholders across the national laboratory system
- Timeframe
- during my time at INL (2022–2025)
- Status
- Status: Shipped
- Numbers
- 2,000+ users · abandoned records: hundreds per year → nearly zero · questions down approximately 50%
The problem: a backlog that only grew
Work leaving the lab went through two systems: the review system and a companion release tool. I owned the backlog for both.
The systems worked. They just weren’t friendly. People got confused, hit the same errors and asked the same questions, and each of those became a backlog item. The developers who could fix them were shared, so our items kept getting pushed behind more urgent work. The backlog grew.
Digging in: three signals
“My record was submitted, right?” Researchers believed they’d submitted records that never were. I walked the test site as a brand-new user, asking one question the whole way: “If this were my first time using this, how would I know what to do next?”
You wouldn’t. The “Start Manager Review” button didn’t appear until every required field was filled in, and nothing told you a button was coming. Nothing warned you when you left a half-finished record. And the record’s status said “New,” which sure sounds like it worked.
The same questions, every day. We tracked the recurring questions and talked them through in our daily meetings. The systems had no user guides, and new employees had it worst.
Feedback and errors with nowhere to go. I consolidated the scattered backlog and ranked it by user feedback and how often each issue came up.
Constraints
- Old system, small budget. Changes had to stay minimal.
- Borrowed developers. They had little time for our department.
- Access was its own project. Getting into anything ourselves meant a whole process.
What I did: the smallest fix for the biggest pain
Every item got the same test: what’s the smallest change that makes this pain go away?
1. Incomplete records: three changes, not a redesign. A rebuilt submission flow would have been nicer, and it would have sat in the developer queue forever. So:
- The “Start Manager Review” button is always visible, grayed out until the record is ready.
- The status changed from “New” to “Unsubmitted Draft.”
- Leaving an incomplete record pops up a warning that changes may not save.
2. The backlog, and the developer bottleneck. A ranked backlog doesn’t help if nobody can work it. I’d finished my B.S. in software engineering, so I shadowed a senior developer, earned access to the repo, Jira and Azure DevOps, then started shipping fixes myself. Each one maps to a pain:
| The pain | The fix |
|---|---|
| Uploads kept failing with confusing errors | Cut the max attachment size from 2GB to 120MB to match a federal repository’s requirements |
| Reviewers who claimed the wrong record needed an admin to undo it | An “Unclaim” button |
| Alternate owners got assigned as peer reviewers and couldn’t finish | Blocked alternate owners from being added as reviewers |
| Action buttons hid off-screen | Moved the action buttons to the left |
| Lost users had no quick way to find help | A help page link in the navigation bar |
| My team manually checked released documents against the reviewed ones | A required checkbox in the release tool’s attachments tab |
| Managers wanted more detail on conference output | Conference subtypes |
| Recently edited records were hard to find | Sort the queue by “Date Last Modified” |
Before: actions on the far right
| ID | Title | Owner | Status | Date Modified | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| REC-0001 | Annual Equipment Report | A. Researcher | Unsubmitted Draft | 2 days ago | View Edit |
| REC-0002 | Field Test Summary | B. Scientist | In Review | 1 week ago | View Edit |
| REC-0003 | Conference Poster Draft | C. Engineer | Approved | 3 weeks ago | View Edit |
After: actions on the left
| Actions | ID | Title | Owner | Status | Date Modified |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Edit | REC-0001 | Annual Equipment Report | A. Researcher | Unsubmitted Draft | 2 days ago |
| View Edit | REC-0002 | Field Test Summary | B. Scientist | In Review | 1 week ago |
| View Edit | REC-0003 | Conference Poster Draft | C. Engineer | Approved | 3 weeks ago |
3. Self-serve help (built with a co-worker). The lab’s training department was working on official courses, but users needed answers now. We chose speed over polish and used tools we already had:
- A department SharePoint homepage (I took point) with links to both systems, the FAQ, a process overview and our expedite request form.
- An FAQ, which I converted from a Word doc to a web page with a linked table of contents.
- A walkthrough video for each system, which my co-worker and I recorded together.
What happened
- Abandoned records: records people left unsubmitted by accident dropped from hundreds per year to nearly zero. Helpdesk emails about how to submit a record dropped dramatically, too.
- Questions: the number of questions decreased by approximately 50%. The walkthrough videos were adopted by multiple research departments for training new users.
- Errors: upload errors became nearly non-existent after I cut the upload limit to 120MB to match a federal repository’s requirements.
- Overall: fewer user-reported issues, and fewer reviews that needed an admin to step in.
I don’t have exact baselines or dates for these. They’re what we saw, not what a dashboard measured.
Looking back
Hard numbers were scarce here, which is exactly why I measure first now.
The biggest result on this page came from a status label and a grayed-out button. Before asking for a redesign, check whether the system is just telling people the wrong thing.