Designing for expert workflows
The goal was not to remove complexity. It was to make complex planning work easier to control.
Enterprise scheduling is dense, repetitive work. A project manager may be maintaining hundreds of tasks while moving between dates, dependencies, progress and resource assignments in the same session.
Simplifying that experience could not mean hiding the capability experienced schedulers relied on. My hands-on design work focused on making common actions faster and clearer while giving more complex decisions enough room.
Designing around repeated resource assignment
Resource assignment was a good example. A scheduler may need to search a large resource pool, assign several people, adjust allocation, replace resources and repeat those actions across many tasks.
I helped shape the Resource Picker around that repeated workflow rather than a simple select-and-close interaction. The design supported searching and selecting multiple resources while keeping existing assignments and relevant context visible.
Compact assignment patterns inside the Gantt were also intended to preserve useful context without allowing resource information to overwhelm an already dense planning surface.
How much friction can we remove from something an experienced user may do dozens of times without taking control away from them?
Layering complexity instead of hiding it
The same principle shaped task editing. Frequent changes could stay close to the schedule. More detailed work could move into Task Details, where dependencies, resource information, scheduling rules and additional task data had more room.
That created a layered interaction model: keep high-frequency work fast, then provide depth when the task requires it.
Static screens were not enough to judge all of this. Focus behaviour, keyboard navigation, overflow and combinations of state mattered under repeated use, so working prototypes became increasingly important for evaluating interaction behaviour earlier. AI-assisted coded exploration later made some of that prototyping faster.
What the work demonstrates
The Resource Picker and Task Details work were still in progress when I left Altus, so I would not present them as completed product outcomes or claim measured usability improvement.
What the work demonstrates is the interaction-design judgement required for dense enterprise products: understanding which complexity is necessary, which friction is accidental, and how to make expert workflows more navigable without reducing their capability.
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