Tell me about a complicated product that you made simpler

In my last internship, I worked on an internal tool that let support agents create refund requests. The form had a lot of fields, and I noticed new agents kept asking which ones actually mattered, so I sat with two agents and looked through recent tickets to see where they were getting stuck. The real issue was that the form mixed required information with rare exception cases, so I suggested moving the exception fields behind an expandable section and rewriting some labels in plain language. I worked with my mentor and the designer, made the changes, and we tested it with a few agents before rolling it out. After that, agents were completing requests faster and the support lead said the number of clarification questions during onboarding dropped.

At my first full-time role at a small consumer-health startup, our app's first-run experience asked users for a long list of permissions and profile details before they could try anything, and we were losing a lot of people right away. I cared a lot about making technology approachable, so I sat down with four people who had uninstalled the app and watched them try to sign up while also reviewing the drop-off points in our analytics. The pattern was clear: people felt overwhelmed and didn’t understand why we needed so much information up front, so I proposed deferring optional profile fields and nonessential permissions until after users had tried the core feature, and rewrote the permission prompts to explain the benefit in plain language. I implemented the change with guidance from a senior engineer and the designer, and when we rolled it out the onboarding completion rate improved by about 20% and fewer users contacted support about setup. That taught me how small changes in flow and language can make a product far more welcoming.