Midea's after-sales platform supports 37,000+ stores and 100M service jobs a year. I led the redesign of its core workflows — making critical tasks 20% faster and raising satisfaction from 2.9 to 4.1.
The problem wasn't the interface.
Context
Midea Group is the largest home appliance company in China, with the most complex business operations. Every month, over 37,000 stores across the country handle after-sales service requests to ensure customer satisfaction and maintain the company’s reputation.
Midea 's Customer Service System had been running for 13 years — long enough to accumulate every bad habit an enterprise platform can develop. Modules got bolted on whenever a new business need appeared. Data lived in isolated silos. Navigation grew longer and slower with every update.
By the time I joined, the damage was visible in the numbers: a 2.7/5 satisfaction score from over 3,000 frontline staff. More telling? 72% of complaints weren't about bugs or crashes. They were about complexity — the daily friction of a system that made hard jobs even harder.
Previous redesign attempts had failed. Not because the teams weren't capable, but because they started with the interface instead of the work.
Dashboard
200 M
Faster core workflows
Dashboard
37,000
Stores
Dashboard
72%
Faster core workflows
Dashboard
2.7/5
from 3000+ responds
Research
The first thing I noticed when I looked at usage data was that people weren't using the system the way it was designed. They skipped the homepage. They stayed locked in list views, constantly refreshing and filtering. They barely touched the dashboard. That's a signal. People don't work around a system unless the system is working against them. To understand why, we visited 24 outlets across the country and interviewed dispatchers, spare-parts clerks, auditors, field engineers, and team coordinators. What we found shifted everything.
System Roles and their daily workflow
Key Finding
Three risks that could
have derailed everything.
Challenge & Strategy
Redesigning a system that processes 100 million service jobs a year isn't a UI project. It's infrastructure reform. Early on, I mapped three challenges that would determine whether we succeeded or stalled.
01
Getting alignment without slowing down.
With 12 PMs and 6 business departments involved, alignment meetings could easily become a bottleneck. I built six rapid prototypes — from conservative tweaks to radical shifts — and ran co-creation workshops rather than review sessions. The goal wasn't to get sign-off. It was to find the edges: technical constraints, business non-negotiables, and tolerance for change. Those workshops gave us a shared map.
02
Shipping change without causing collapse.
We adopted incremental rollout — not as a compromise, but as a deliberate risk management strategy. New flows ran as shadow modules in parallel with the existing system, with instant rollback available. Changes shipped in small, testable slices before wider deployment. This turned "change" from something scary into something controlled and reversible.
03
Getting alignment without slowing down.
Live data kept revealing things we hadn't anticipated — combined orders, maintenance edge cases, mid-flow logistics exceptions. Rather than patching, I worked with the business team to map 100+ process variations and distill them into 12 modular process nodes. The architecture could handle daily work simply, expand for edge cases, and grow with future needs.
The design framework:
Glance, Dive, Focus.
Design Framework
After research, I needed a mental model that could hold the complexity together — something the team could use to evaluate every design decision. I landed on three modes of work that described how frontline staff actually operated.
This wasn't just a UX framework. It became the backbone for every feature decision we made.
Dashboard
01 Glance
Orient fast. All roles know what matters right now.
List View
02 Dive
Stay in context. Handle multiple threads without losing your place.
Detail View
03 Focus
Act with confidence. Know exactly what to do next.
Glance: a dashboard that actually helps.
Dashboard
The old homepage was static. It showed the same thing to everyone, regardless of role — which meant it was useful to no one in particular. Most users skipped it entirely.
We rebuilt it around one question: what does this specific person need to see in the first 10 seconds? Dispatchers got deadline-critical orders with risk flags. Managers got KPI summaries and team-wide risk signals. Clerks got inventory alerts.
We also built a centralized notification hub organized into three tiers: routine updates, attention-needed items, and must-act-now flags. Previously, critical alerts were buried in the same stream as low-priority updates. Now, high-stakes signals couldn't be missed.
Dive: lists that let you think.
List view
The old list view was a filtering treadmill. Users spent most of their time adjusting filters, refreshing, and hunting for signals the system wasn't surfacing. Horizontal scrolling meant you could never see the full picture at once.
The redesign was built around multi-thread monitoring — the actual mental model of dispatchers and coordinators. Orders are now grouped by relationship and relevance. Inline risk tags surface anomalies within the flow rather than requiring a separate check. Quick-action buttons appear contextually based on order status.
We also reduced the default filter set based on usage data — showing only what people actually used, with an option to customize further. This alone cut decision overhead significantly.
Focus: detail pages that
guide instead of overwhelm.
List view
The old list view was a filtering treadmill. Users spent most of their time adjusting filters, refreshing, and hunting for signals the system wasn't surfacing. Horizontal scrolling meant you could never see the full picture at once.
The redesign was built around multi-thread monitoring — the actual mental model of dispatchers and coordinators. Orders are now grouped by relationship and relevance. Inline risk tags surface anomalies within the flow rather than requiring a separate check. Quick-action buttons appear contextually based on order status.
We also reduced the default filter set based on usage data — showing only what people actually used, with an option to customize further. This alone cut decision overhead significantly.
What shipped,
and what it proved.
Impact
The rollout began with a gray-release pilot. Frontline staff tested the new system alongside the old one.
Dashboard
+20%
Faster core workflows
Dashboard
+20%
Faster core workflows
Dashboard
+20%
Faster core workflows
Dashboard
+20%
Faster core workflows
"The new system looks great and makes my job much easier. I no longer need to keep adjusting filters."
Chen Xiaochu — Dispatcher, 13 years experience
""Every screen clearly tells me what I need to do. My productivity doubled."
He Lu — Service coordinator, 1.5 years experience
Beyond CSS
The design system built for this project — the modular components, the information hierarchy patterns, the risk-flagging architecture — was adopted by three other internal platforms at Midea, covering supply chain, sales, and HR.
What started as a service platform redesign became the foundation for how Midea builds internal tools.
Zooming Out
What I actually learned
01
User research isn't about finding problems. It's about finding the right problems.
With 12 PMs and 6 business departments involved, alignment meetings could easily become a bottleneck. I built six rapid prototypes — from conservative tweaks to radical shifts — and ran co-creation workshops rather than review sessions. The goal wasn't to get sign-off. It was to find the edges: technical constraints, business non-negotiables, and tolerance for change. Those workshops gave us a shared map.
02
In complex organizations, design is a negotiation.
Every decision I made touched multiple stakeholders with legitimate, sometimes conflicting, concerns. The co-creation workshops, the incremental rollout, the shadow modules — these weren't just UX tactics. They were ways to build trust while shipping real change.
03
Systems thinking is the only way to do systems work.
The 12 modular process nodes, the three-layer detail architecture, the Glance/Dive/Focus framework — none of these were invented for a single screen. They were built to scale. That's why the design didn't stop at customer service.
