An outdated portal had grown beyond its original purpose. Routine requests were being handled through email, coaches wrote feedback in Word documents for another team to re-enter, clients called to request changes, and delegates and clients shared a single account.
Goals
- Replace repetitive manual handling with clearer self-service journeys.
- Support the needs of client-services teams, account managers, coaches, client managers and delegates.
- Make feedback easier to enter, review and publish safely.
- Improve navigation and reduce the number of requests handled directly by the client-services team.
- Move legacy content into a more dependable structure.
My role
I helped lead the rebuild from early discovery through delivery. I mapped user needs, shaped user flows and prototypes, recommended a React and Strapi approach, guided structural and component decisions with the development team, planned the legacy-data migration, supported testing and prepared the rollout.
Approach
Discovery and user journeys
The platform needed to serve several groups with different responsibilities. Client-services teams managed bookings and sessions. Coaches planned agendas and entered feedback. Client managers requested sessions for delegates. Delegates needed their own access to view feedback and request updates.
Clearer workflow
The rebuilt platform introduced role-based access and a more deliberate approval path. Coaches could enter rich-text feedback directly, assign it for review, receive it back for changes and publish it once approved. Delegates could log in separately and access their own feedback.
Legacy-data migration
The existing information sat across WordPress post content, ACF fields, custom post types, spreadsheet data and seven tables across two databases. Relationships were inconsistent and often depended on manually entered values rather than dependable IDs.
I analysed the source data, wrote transformation scripts, worked only on copies, created comparison scripts, checked duplicate and outdated records, spot-checked transformed outputs and introduced explicit data-retention checks.
Results
- Direct requests to the client-services team dropped dramatically.
- Coaches could manage feedback without Word-document workarounds.
- Users found the platform easier to navigate.
- Clients gave positive feedback after launch.
- The platform continued to improve iteratively rather than ending as a one-off delivery.