An Expert Tool for Expert Users

2018–2019 · Enterprise SaaS · Diagnostic Systems · Oracle

Unifying Five Legacy Diagnostic Tools into a Single Workbench

Legacy diagnostic interface compared with a unified DCAC workbench.

I owned the UX strategy and unification approach for this platform—defining how five fragmented diagnostic tools could be consolidated into a single workbench without flattening expert workflows or disrupting established diagnostic practices relied on by Oracle’s most senior support engineers.

Impact

Replaced five fragmented diagnostic tools with one unified platform

Adopted by Oracle’s most senior support engineers across Database, Middleware, EBS, Fusion, and Linux

Became the primary diagnostic tool for on-premise product support

Contributed production patterns back to the Redwood Design System

The Problem

Oracle’s most experienced support engineers were diagnosing critical customer issues using a patchwork of homegrown tools—each built by different teams, with overlapping capabilities and no shared workflow.

These engineers had decades of domain expertise, but their tools forced constant context-switching, duplicated effort, and inconsistent analysis. Leadership wanted consolidation—without losing the specialized capabilities experts depended on.

I had to replace five tools with one—without simplifying away expertise or breaking workflows that already worked.

Five tools. Different mental models. No shared platform.

My Approach

Immersed

Embedded with senior engineers across multiple product lines

Mapped

Documented critical workflows and non-negotiable capabilities

Unified

Designed a workbench aligned to expert diagnostic methodology

Shipped

Transitioned design to shipping team; product released to production

The platform made diagnostic intelligence visible, inspectable, and usable.

The Outcome

This work established a shared diagnostic platform and mental model for on-premise support, replacing tool sprawl with a unified system that scaled across product lines and informed subsequent internal tooling and design-system patterns.

One unified platform supporting expert diagnosis across Oracle’s on-premise products.

The Insight

Expert users don’t want simpler tools. They want tools that respect how they already think. My job wasn’t to retrain them—it was to give them a system that matched their mental models and made automation a collaborator, not a black box.