Verizon Wireline — Design Principles – The Priceless Oaks

Design Principles

Designing for Operational Clarity

Rather than redesigning visuals first, the focus was on restructuring how order state and ownership were communicated.

The goal was to reduce interpretation and make the system status immediately understandable without requiring operational experience.

1. Status Before Detail
The primary order state is always visible without opening records.

2. Ownership Visibility
Each fallout indicates a responsible group or the next action.

3. Progressive Disclosure
Complex data appears only when required for resolution.

4. Exception-Focused Workflow
Users work from problems first, not from full order data.

Design Translation

These principles guided the restructuring of the Order Manager from a data-inspection tool into a workflow-resolution interface.

Legacy: Users searched → opened record → interpreted codes
New: Users immediately saw the fallout status and next action

Legacy: Ownership discovered through investigation
New: Ownership displayed as part of state

Legacy: Full data loaded first
New: Details revealed only when needed

These structural changes required visible interface adjustments that redefined how status, ownership, and detail were presented.

From Risk to Interface

The documented system risks directly informed structural interface changes. The first priority was making order status immediately visible and interpretable without requiring operational knowledge.

Problem
In the legacy environment, order status existed as coded values within dense tables. Users had to open records and interpret abbreviated codes to understand the fallout state.

Design Decision
Primary order status was elevated into a persistent, visually distinct header area and decoupled from secondary attributes.

Operational Impact
Reduced interpretation time and minimized reliance on tribal knowledge during order triage.

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Order status became a persistent, high-visibility signal rather than a coded value buried within dense record tables.

Ownership

Problem

In the legacy workflow, ownership was embedded within task names, work pool columns, and coded routing logic. Determining responsibility required investigation and operational familiarity.

Regional and National users selected work based on interpretive experience rather than structured assignment by profile or role.

Design Decision

Ownership was surfaced as a first-level operational attribute.

The Unified UI introduced role-based dashboards that directly aligned fallout orders with user profiles, making responsibility explicit before record inspection.

Ownership became visible at both the dashboard and table levels.

Operational Impact

Reduced ambiguity during handoffs
Increased accountability across regions
Reduced interpretive task selection behavior
Shortened investigation time before resolution

Dashboard

Dashboard-Level Ownership

dash-ownership

Role-based dashboards aligned fallout orders to individual user profiles, making ownership explicit before investigation.

Table

Table-Level Ownership

table-ownership

Responsible group visibility was elevated within the primary order table, eliminating reliance on coded routing logic to determine ownership.

Workflow Unification

Problem

Provisioning teams operated across more than 250 legacy systems, each serving a specific function in the order lifecycle.

Users navigated between tools to:

Validate order status
Review fallout codes
Confirm routing logic
Complete downstream updates

The operational context was fragmented across systems. Task completion required manual cross-referencing and experiential knowledge of where to retrieve relevant data.

Design Decision

The Unified UI (UUI) was introduced as an orchestration layer across legacy systems.

Rather than replacing all systems outright, UUI:

Consolidated critical workflows into a single operational interface
Surfaced context-specific data from legacy systems via integrated paths (iframes and embedded views)
Reduced cross-system navigation for common resolution tasks
Standardized interaction patterns across previously inconsistent tools

The system became profile-based, aligning workflow visibility to user role and regional responsibility.

UUI functioned as a unifying operational layer rather than a wholesale system replacement.

Operational Impact

Reduced system footprint from ~250 to ~80 active tools
Minimized cross-application navigation during fallout resolution
Increased efficiency in triage and handoff
Enabled retirement or consolidation of redundant systems

Prior to UUI, provisioning teams operated across numerous disconnected systems, often navigating multiple browser tabs and interface paradigms to complete a single resolution task.

lega1

Fragmented legacy environment requiring cross-system navigation, interpretive validation, and experiential knowledge of routing logic.

The Unified UI was introduced not as a wholesale replacement, but as an orchestration layer — consolidating fragmented workflows while surfacing legacy data contextually within a standardized operational interface.

HP - level 2 - My tasks selected

Unified operational layer consolidating workflow visibility, task alignment, and contextual legacy system access within a single interface.

Reduced cross-system navigation and enabled structured, role-based workflow resolution within a unified operational environment.

Role-Based Visibility & Structured Assignment

Problem

Even after unification, inconsistent workload distribution and informal task selection behaviors persisted across regions.

Supervisors lacked structured visibility into assignment balance, regional throughput, and fallout concentration.

Design Decision

UUI introduced role-based dashboards and supervisory views that:

Aligned tasks to user profiles
Structured assignment visibility
Provided regional workload transparency
Reduced interpretive task selection

HP - level 2 - Supervisor - My Team Tasks - Ben

Operational Impact

Reduced cherry-picking behavior
Increased accountability across regions
Enabled structured workload balancing
Improved resolution predictability