Rescue In-Session

Why stick with me?

I know you have a lot of portfolios to review—it’s time-consuming. So why is this one worth your time?

Structuring Chat for Clarity & Scalability: Developed a clear separation between public and private chats, laying the foundation for long-term improvements in user experience.

Small decisions, big development impact: As a designer we navitate through value and effort, and close collab with engineering can always uncover unexpected twists.

Project Summary

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Rescue has been the company’s flagship product for almost 25 years. Its Desktop Technician Console enables technicians (support agents) to efficiently provide remote support, troubleshoot issues seamlessly across various environments. Rescue's main customer base is Enterprise and GSI including HP, Best Buy, Lenovo.

Rescue launched the Web Technician Console (WebTC), a web-based version of the product, aiming for near-complete feature parity with the desktop version. The feature adaptation is a multi-year process, prioritizing features based on importance. In-Session Collaboration is one of the most highly requested by customers.

My role

As a Product Designer, I led the UX delivery process, translating PM briefs into new designs while incorporating feasibility feedback from Engineering.

Project goals

Adaption: Adapt the feature to the Web Technician Console while using the Desktop Technician Console as the baseline, ensuring its logic and functionality remain intact.

UX improvements: Enhance the invitation flow and chat with UX improvements for a better user experience.

Business goals

The introduction of WebTC carries customer focused and internal business goals.On the customer's side:

No update management

Frees customers from the update management process of the native app

Have a new modern UI

That is familiar to technicians and require minimail training

Expand platform reach

Have the Console usable on any OS and even in the field (tablet, Chrome OS etc.)

Challenges

Separation of public & private

In the Desktop Technician Console, private and public messaging are happening in the same chat section. There are two inputs, while private & public messages are visually distinguised with an extra special characters only, leaving room for confusion and error.

Space, space, space...

For technicians, the key performance indicator is resolution time. Screen real estate is crucial, required information and actions should to be easily accessible without overwhelming the user.

Testing the Desktop Version

As product designers, we have a full account to test existing solutions however we often face with limitations. It's difficult to simulate certain scenarios, especially which involve multiple users and/or devices. In this case, I could only rely to a recording of a demo call that the senior PM gave to my designer colleague from whom I took over the project (as it was my first assignment as a newcomer at the company).

Redesigned 'Chat section'

How to differentiate between public vs. private messaging

A crucial design decision was how to differentiate between public and private messages. Currently, in Desktop TC there are two separate input fields, but this could lead to errors and confusion for technicians.

To ensure clarity, I conducted a competitive analysis, reviewing how GoTo Meeting and Microsoft Teams handle similar cases and tried to apply the conclusions to our enviroment.

Chat in the Desktop Technician Console

Moving private messaging to a separate tab

Based on the best practice, it was clear that we need to pivot towards a single-input system. On the other hand, while keeping all chat interactions in one place might have seem intuitive, discussions with PMs revealed that technician-to-technician messaging is infrequent. This led me to reconsider whether private chat should remain in the main chat area or be better integrated into a broader collaboration hub.

To improve clarity and usability, I decided to move private messaging into the Collaboration tab.

Best practices

Moving private messaging to the new 'Collaboration tab'

This change is expected to bring the following benefits:

✅

Keeps public chat distraction-free

The chat panel also includes system update messages, which can easily cause overcrowding.

✅

Prevents accidental miscommunication

Reducing the risk of sending private messages in the wrong context.

✅

Creates a cleaner, more structured experience

Making collaboration tools easier to navigate.

Using the word 'expected' was not accidental. In an ideal world, user testing the new solution should have been benefice, however, unfortunately wasn’t possible due to resource constraints. Should I have had the resources, I'd have definitely test it. We will monitor the performance post-launch and refine the design based on real-world feedback.

Challenge - ‘Displaying longer names’

Balancing readability & action accessibility

In the Collaboration tab, technicians can invite, dismiss, and edit permissions for collaborators. However, limited space makes it difficult to accommodate longer names without overcrowding the UI. Truncation ensures a clean layout but risks hiding critical information.

On the Desktop Console, actions are always visible without extra clicks, suggesting that keeping them immediately accessible might be vital in Web Technician Console as well.

Limited space makes it difficult to display longer names and actions at the same time

Solution: Prioritization for Task Efficiency

To evaluate the impact of different solutions, we interviewed PMs to understand how often these actions are used. We found that:

Most technicians primarily use this page for communication, and these actions are not frequently accessed.

User value vs. development effort 1.

Value vs. effort

As designers, it’s natural to aim for perfect user flows and feature-rich products. But in reality, we often need to pivot or make tough decisions due to time, resource, or technical constraints. Sometimes, even seemingly simple elements—like a button—can have a surprisingly high development impact. Balancing ambition with feasibility is part of the design process.

I encountered a similar challenge while designing the Collaboration tab’s other key feature: the invitation flow. It lets users search and invite technicians using a live search. Because results update instantly, I initially wanted to keep the last selected technician visible after a new search—aligning with the 'visibility of system status' usability heuristic.

After development began, an engineer informed me that implementing this solution would require significant effort for the system to remember and display the selection from the previous search.

In situations like this, it’s helpful to step back and use a Value–Effort matrix to prioritize features based on their user impact and implementation effort.

Value

Keeping the last selection could be useful for quick reference, but might clutter the inferface.

Effort

Requires complex state management and potential edge case handling.

Decision: we should embrace simplicity and avoid unnecessary complexity by opting for a clean slate approach for each new search.

Uncovering overseen aspects

Value vs. effort vol.2

As mentioned earlier, even simple UI elements can carry unexpected development impact. A similar challenge came up during the development of the stage of the invitation flow when the invitation is sent, and the invited technician is notified.

In these cases, we typically use a snackbar message for feedback. However, I also introduced a new UI element—a card under the Collaboration tab—that gives the technician clear options to Accept or Cancel the invitation, ensuring they remain in control of the interaction.

Status = Forgotten

It became clear that adding the 'Cancel' button here (which doesn’t exist in the Desktop version) would be technically challenging. Most features in DTC only require frontend changes, as the backend is already running smoothly. However, when additional backend support is needed, it typically involves integrating one or two extra systems.

We agreed that leaving out this option was acceptable in this case. If a technician is already handling too many sessions, they can’t be invited anyway—and they still have the option to communicate via chat.

I asked the engineer for a meeting to better understand the technical environment. During our discussion about what feedback we could retrieve from the backend to determine an invited technician’s status, I learned that the system can actually provide a wide range of information—both before and during a session.

It made me realize that while designing the collaboration tab and different phases of invitation I didn't cover cases when a technician's status may change during a session. It can easily happen that a technician's connection goes off, and this is something that we need to inform the user about.

Identifying when surfacing information adds value

While designing and writing the copy, I had to carefully consider the spacing constraints I mentioned earlier—ensuring the added information was worth the space it occupied.

Making icon usage more consistent

While reviewing the ‘Technicians’ section of the Collaboration tab, I noticed a small inconsistency worth addressing. For pending technicians, I used an X icon to cancel the process, but for removing joined technicians, I used a Trash icon. I decided to reconsider this for clearer and more consistent iconography.

I needed to act quickly, but luckily we had the time to reconsider and fine-tune different scenarios here so that we could provide an enhanced user experience. I truly enjoyed working on this project which brought me very valuable lessons. As for the implementation, the feature is under development and will be launched in H2 2025.

Takeaways and lessons learned

Space constraints demand creative solutions – Truncating names moving private messaging all reinforced the importance of designing for limited real estate without compromising functionality.

Balancing value and effort is crucial in design – We need to priotize features based on their value to the user ad the effort required to implement them to maximize impact whili minimazing costs.

Continously evaluate and refine designs – Design handoff to developers is rarely prefect. It often turns out that simple UI elements or interactions could result in significant development implications. Therefore, a good collaboration with development and continous improvement is essential to deliver great products.

Want to see more?

Check out my next case study about the challenges around introducting a new reusable UI element to Rescue WebTC.

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