About the ChargeLab CSMS

OVERVIEW

The main goal of the ChargeLab CSMS (known internally as the site host dashboard) is to give EV charging operators the tools to manage their charging infrastructure easily, intuitively and at scale. Users already had the ability to configure chargers, control driver access, monitor charger performance and troubleshoot issues remotely. Despite all this, our site hosts were missing the ability to manage their dashboard users in a way that scaled, putting a large burden on our support and solutions engineering team.

Role
Product Designer & Researcher

Tools
Figma

Timeline
3 weeks (1 simultaneous week of discovery product and technical discovery, 1 week of design and 1 validation research)

Problem

ChargeLab's platform manages EV charging networks across multiple companies and sites. Admins needed a way to manage user permissions, allowing them to limit which companies and what roles each user holds. The current interface was very limited and was not designed for operators to manage hundred of companies and roles at once. The core challenge was simply: how can we make the process of adding, removing and updating roles simpler for power users.

The Research

In conversation with power users (both internal and external), we learned that user management was a pain point for anyone managing more than 20 users. Often times, our internal solutions engineering team would spend hours manually adding or removing users to the dashboard.

Design Goals

• Empower users to make changes to roles at a network or company level

• Empower users to add and remove users as needed

• Show users the right level of details for the task, allowing users to dig deeper as needed without clutter

• Ensure trust and usability by making the feature feel like a native part of the product ecosystem

Solution validation with Claude and Figma Make

With the use of Claude and Figma Make, we managed to spin up prototypes that allowed us to get valuable feedback from a few of our largest clients. Through this exercise, we iterated the solution before handing it off to our development team. Due to the complexity of this project, the prototypes also proved to be valuable for our developers as certain flows and key decisions could be shown more visually.

Solution

The final solution addressed how a ChargeLab super admin (someone managing users across potentially thousands of companies) could view, filter, manage permissions from a single interface without losing context. It introduced a two-mode experience (an all companies view and a single companies) view to address the various user types we have. The decision made ensure than the experience would scale as our clients continued to add users to their dashboards.