IAB Member Management
Replacing spreadsheets with a scalable, self-service portal.
Led product and UX design from discovery through delivery for IAB's first member management platform, defining the operational model that replaced manual spreadsheets and email, reducing update time from 2–4 hours to under 30 minutes and cutting support tickets by 25%, with changes syncing automatically into Salesforce instead of manual re-entry.
- Role
- Lead Designer,
0-1 UX Strategy and Design - Team
- 6 members
- Timeline
- 2 months (2023)
- Company
- Ascendum Solutions, for IAB
The Opportunity
IAB managed users for over 700 member organizations through spreadsheets emailed between administrators. The process was manual, inconsistent, and prone to version conflicts and human error. There was no formal product or documented workflow to follow, so the challenge wasn't just digitizing a spreadsheet. It was understanding how user management was handled by these organizations, and defining an operational model that didn't exist yet.
The Decision That Changed Everything
Rather than replicate the spreadsheet's structure in a nicer interface, I designed around how administrators actually worked:
- Built the information architecture around administrator workflows, not the spreadsheet's row-and-column structure.
- Designed a centralized system that could support organizations, committees, initiatives, and events, not just a member list.
- Ensured edits to member information propagated consistently across related records, syncing automatically into Salesforce rather than requiring manual re-entry.
- Defined a deliberately narrow MVP that delivered the greatest operational value without exceeding budget or engineering capacity.
The trade-off: a smaller initial feature set, in exchange for a system that would stay maintainable as complexity grew.
Design
The interface was built around clear, universal navigation and a visible edit/expand pattern for company details, with a toggle between key contacts and the full member list. A prominently placed call-to-action for adding new members and color-coded selection states kept common admin tasks fast, while edit and delete actions stayed contextual, appearing only once a record was selected.
Behind the Decisions
The project highlighted how quickly a user management system becomes complex: organizations, members, permissions, committees, events, and initiatives all needed to stay synchronized while still feeling simple to the administrators using it.
There were certain trade-offs that had to be made to stay within scope:
- No landing dashboard: A homepage in the form of a dashboard would have been ideal to give users an overview of their organization information. However, given budget and time constraints, this had to be held off.
- Editing a member from anywhere: I centralized editing within dedicated management screens instead of allowing the user to edit information from anywhere in the app, keeping the system easier to build, maintain, and extend as IAB's needs grew.
Outcomes
- Reduced time spent updating member information from 2–4 hours to under 30 minutes.
- Reduced the number of support tickets by 25%.
- Automated updates into Salesforce removed the need for manual data entry, making maintenance significantly cheaper and removing the room for error.
Reflections
Designing a complete user management system from scratch, with little more than spreadsheets and stakeholder conversations to work from, was quite challenging but the result was a scalable workflow that changed how IAB manages its members organization information altogether.