OpenCore
Redesigning OpenCore - an automation orchestrator
Category
Product Design
My Role
UX/UI Design, UX Research
Impact of redesign
Page views
90% increase
Sessions
66% increase
Visitors
33% increase
Context
OpenCore is the platform behind managing and orchestrating automations across teams. When I joined the project, the UI felt outdated and inconsistent, which made it harder for users to navigate and understand key features. My goal was not only to modernize the visual design, but also to improve the overall user experience—making the platform more intuitive, efficient, and user-friendly.
Approach
My approach combined quick wins with long-term thinking. I started by identifying the most painful friction points for users—things that slowed them down or caused confusion. At the same time, I worked to establish a more consistent visual language and clearer UI patterns across the product. As part of this, I created a unified design system and introduced both dark and light mode to give users more flexibility and improve accessibility.
Working closely with developers and stakeholders, I prioritized improvements based on user impact and feasibility. Some updates were small but powerful, like improving empty states or simplifying navigation. Others required rethinking how key features were structured. Throughout, I stayed focused on one goal: making OpenCore more intuitive and valuable for the people using it every day.
Research
While updating the UI, I conducted four user interviews to explore how the overall user experience could be improved. I spoke with two experienced users, one new user and one former user to get a broader perspective and as much nuance as possible.
Analysing and prioritization of findings
After analysing the findings, I set up a workshop with the team — the two developers and our CEO — to share the interview findings and decide which issues to tackle first. Together, we used a decision matrix to prioritize the fixes based on how important they were and how much effort they would take to implement.
Solution: Let’s Make Searching Less Annoying
One user highlighted a key frustration: any view showing a table must include filtering to stay efficient. He also emphasized the need for visible page numbers to maintain an overview when dealing with thousands of work items. These may seem like small details, but they have a big impact on usability—and since they were quick wins from a development perspective, I made sure to include both in the redesign to directly address his needs and improve the overall experience.
Solution: Helping Users Feel at Home
When I spoke with a churned user, she shared that she had explored several RPA orchestrators for her bachelor’s thesis. Her first impression of our platform? It felt bare—especially the Home Page, which at the time was completely empty. That feedback stuck with me. As part of the redesign, I gave the Home menu a much-needed face lift by surfacing the most essential resources for new users: links to our documentation, client libraries, setup guides, and the community forum. The goal was to make users feel immediately supported and pointed in the right direction from the moment they log in.
Solution: Hey Data, What’s Up?
As part of the redesign, I focused on improving how users interact with our built-in AI assistant. While the assistant was already part of the product, I reworked the experience to make responses more intuitive and actionable. I introduced a new results view where users can toggle between a structured data table and underlying Mongo aggregate data. Both are shown in expandable panels, allowing users to tailor the view to their context and focus on what matters most—without overwhelming the interface.
Solution: One Workspace to Rule Them All
To improve collaboration, we brainstormed how to make team creation more intuitive. The previous solution felt clunky and wasn’t easy to use. We looked to familiar patterns for inspiration and took a page from Figma’s workspace model—allowing users to invite teammates by email and instantly start collaborating within a shared space. This made the process simpler, more familiar, and easier to scale as teams grow.
Design process and learnings
Working in a startup environment meant the design process was far from linear. With many moving parts and limited resources, I had to stay flexible and continuously reassess priorities. Instead of following a traditional step-by-step approach, I focused on designing what would deliver the most immediate value to our users.
This meant jumping between tasks—sometimes shaping high-level flows, other times refining microinteractions—while always keeping the user experience front and center. It taught me to be comfortable with ambiguity, work fast without compromising on quality, and align closely with both business and engineering to ship improvements that mattered.