ASHCore
UX Design & Internal Tools
A guide for the live call.
During my three-month UX internship at American Specialty Health, I redesigned part of ASHCore — the internal system customer-service agents relied on while assisting members. The answers agents needed already existed, but they were scattered across spreadsheets, SharePoint, email, and multiple internal tools.
Through a workflow audit, five agent interviews, and three rounds of usability testing, I designed the Call Guide: an in-call experience that brought recommended steps, protocols, search, and documentation into one connected workflow.
Call efficiency
<7 min
average routine-call time after the redesign, down from 10–15 minutes.
Documentation accuracy
~30%
reduction in incomplete or incorrect submissions.
Usability testing
3 rounds
iterative sessions refining the guide around real call workflow.
Design exploration
40+
wireframes from early structure through final handoff.
Problem Space
Every answer was there — just never where agents needed it.
ASHCore contained essential member and call information, but agents still depended on other systems to complete routine interactions.
Current workflow
Each extra lookup interrupted the conversation.
Agents moved between SharePoint, Excel, Outlook, other internal systems, and one another during a single call. Every hop extended the call and created another opportunity for inconsistent documentation.
Discovery
Starting with the workflow agents already had.
Before proposing a solution, I audited the current process and used agent feedback to identify where routine calls became slow, uncertain, or error-prone.
What the design audit found.
10–15 Minutes Per Routine Call
Even common interactions took longer than agents expected.
1 In 4 Calls Flagged
Incomplete notes, inconsistent documentation, or unclear procedure handling.
3+ Tools Per Call
Answers lived across too many places to resolve one interaction.
Listening to how agents actually work a call.
I interviewed five customer-service agents who worked the phones daily to understand how they searched, verified changing information, asked for help, and documented an interaction while a member waited.
Agent interviews
Four needs the redesign had to address.
The interviews exposed workarounds around promo codes, shipping information, procedure updates, and call logging. Affinity mapping turned those examples into faster lookup, connected resources, visible updates, and guided documentation.
Affinity map
Two agents, one fragmented workflow.
Agent persona
Andre is a newer agent learning the tools while trying not to place members on hold.
Agent persona
Sarah is an experienced agent who knows the process but still loses time searching across systems.
Their confidence differed most while verifying information.
By the documentation stage, both agents were slowed by the same fragmented workflow.
Shared journey map
The information did not need to be recreated.
Every script, disclaimer, and procedure already lived somewhere within ASH's systems. The opportunity was to make the right piece easy to find, understand, and document without pulling the agent away from the member.
How Might We
Redesign ASHCore to better support agents in logging calls and managing customer interactions?
Ideation
Building the guide around the rhythm of a call.
The research established three goals for the redesign, each addressing a moment when the existing workflow slowed agents down.
User goals and features.
Four phases of a routine interaction.
Start the call and open the guide, get oriented through recommended steps or search, work the ordered protocol, then log completed steps into the call record and close.
User flow
Interface foundations.
I explored the Call Guide through more than 40 wireframes, using reusable patterns for tabs, task items, filters, step details, and primary actions. Keeping those elements consistent made it easier to compare versions and communicate changes during testing.
Wireframes
Interface patterns
Testing & Iteration
Making the guide readable while the agent was still listening.
Across three rounds, five agents worked through the Call Guide and reviewed how it fit into a routine member interaction. Drag a frame to move between versions.
Workflow Completion
Agents worked a routine call end to end using the guide.
Navigation Comprehension
Agents explained what each tab and action was for.
Iteration Review
Each round reviewed the previous round's changes.
Giving the task list a job agents could recognize.
Early versions treated the task list as a generic checklist, and agents didn't immediately connect it to the call in front of them. Naming it as the Call Guide, ordering it around the protocol, and giving each task a clear label made the connection between the interface and the conversation obvious without extra explanation.
Removing precision that slowed the search.
The first filtering pattern exposed every attribute an agent could search by, which asked them to understand the underlying data model mid-call. Reducing the filters to object, label, and apply let agents search the way they already thought about a call, without translating their question into the system's language first.
Final Delivery
One connected guide for the moments that used to send agents searching.
The Call Guide brought recommended steps, search, procedural detail, documentation, and an agent's own shortcuts into a single in-call view, replacing the spreadsheets, SharePoint pages, and side conversations the workflow audit had traced at the start of the project.
Recommended Steps
The guide opens on the steps most relevant to the call already in progress, so an agent starts from a recommendation instead of a blank workflow.
Search & Filter
When the recommended steps don't cover the situation, search and a small set of filters — object, label, apply — get an agent to the right script or procedure without leaving the call.
Step Detail
Each step expands into the exact script, disclaimer, or procedure text an agent needs, formatted for reading out loud while a member is on the line.
Select & Push
Completed steps get selected and pushed directly into the call record, replacing the manual re-typing that used to happen after the call ended.
My Shortcuts
Agents can pin the steps and procedures they use most, so the guide adapts to their specific queue instead of treating every agent's day the same way.
What the redesign changed.
Agents moved through routine calls without leaving the guide to search, and the documentation they left behind reflected the actual steps of the call instead of a summary written from memory afterward.
Final handoff
Next Steps
Validating the guide under live-call pressure.
Usability testing confirmed the guide worked in a controlled setting. The next phase would confirm it holds up in the unpredictability of a live queue.
Reflection
What my first end-to-end UX project taught me.
Critiques sharpen a design faster than solo iteration.
Design reviews with the UX architects caught assumptions I couldn't see on my own, and pushed each round of the guide closer to how agents actually worked.
Collaboration leads to better internal tools than isolated design work.
Sitting with agents while they worked a real call surfaced constraints no amount of solo wireframing would have found.
Wireframes clarify thinking before visual design can.
Working through 40-plus low-fidelity versions let me test structure and flow before spending time on visual polish that would have been thrown away.
Process gives ambiguity structure to move through.
A three-month internship with no fixed brief felt open-ended at first. Breaking it into audit, interviews, ideation, and testing gave the ambiguity a shape I could actually work inside of.
Thank You
With gratitude.
Thank you to the American Specialty Health UX team for trusting an intern with a system agents relied on every day, and to the customer-service agents who gave up time during a live shift to talk through their workflow, sit through usability sessions, and tell me honestly what wasn't working.
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