Lead Center inbox 2.0

Problem

When the Inbox worked against users

The inbox was originally built for phone calls. Its three sections, Incoming, Active, and Recent, mapped cleanly to a call’s lifecycle. But when texts, forms, and chats were added, they were forced into the same structure. Behind the scenes, hidden rules and auto-timeouts moved interactions between sections.

As a result, users reported interactions “disappearing,” and support tickets continued to rise. Users couldn’t rely on Lead Center to manage leads, putting long-term adoption at risk.

What I did first

Understanding the inbox

To understand how the existing system worked, I mapped every inbox state, section, and logic rule, working closely with engineers to confirm the backend behavior. Then, I ran comparative usability tests with four Lead Center users, showing them the current inbox alongside a prototype.

What we learned: users were icon-hunting. They could not reliably tell what needed attention. Three of four wanted a simpler overall experience.

"I am inferring that someone responded to this form submission, but I'm not sure. It's not apparent that someone took care of something."
— James, Real Estate Investor

Design thinking

Inbox as a to-do list

Our challenge: redesign the inbox to eliminate missing interactions, maintain high-volume B2B workflow reliability, and create a foundation for future features, all without disrupting call-tracking reporting.

Key decisions

User-driven workflow: Items stay put until the user takes action.
One source of truth: Every new interaction appears in one section.
Recency-based priority: Consolidated states into a single active view, using timestamps to surface urgency.
Predictable behavior: Removed auto-timeouts, even if it meant more manual cleanup.

The aha moment: timestamp as natural priority

My initial exploration had three sections: New, Active, and Reviewed. I kept running into a structural problem, an incoming call in New and an ongoing call in Active could push each other out of the view.

That led to the breakthrough. I collapsed New and Active into a single section and let timestamps determine priority. The most recent interaction automatically rises to the top, ensuring urgent items remain visible without additional logic.

Removing a section simplified the solution and eliminated the need for any prioritization rules

One inbox, one source of truth

Previously, new interactions landed in different sections depending on interaction type. In the new model, every interaction goes to the same place — Active. This created a single, predictable source of truth and removed the ambiguity that made interactions feel “lost.”

Removing auto-timeout and the tradeoff

The most important structural change was eliminating the automatic rules that moved interactions between sections. Now interactions remain in Active until the user marks them Reviewed. This matched the to-do list mental model users already had.

‍Tradeoff:
This approach introduced one risk: Active could become crowded. In usability testing, users didn’t always move items to Reviewed. I advocated for a bulk “Mark as Reviewed” action to reduce friction, but it was scoped out for launch.

Getting it shipped

Org Alignment: The Inbox Roadshow

Because this changed a fundamental product behavior, I partnered with my PM to run an internal alignment tour, the Inbox Roadshow, before anything was officially committed on to the roadmap. We walkthrough the current system logic, user research findings, and proposed structural changes.

This helped teams understand both the technical complexity and the user impact, building alignment across engineering, product, and leadership.

Impact 🎉

After launch, support tickets about “missing” interactions were eliminated.

The simplified inbox architecture also became the foundation for several soft-phone capabilities shipped later that year, including Call Waiting and Queue Callback features that would have been difficult to build on top of the previous system.

The redesign effectively graduated Lead Center from an MVP to a product customers could trust.

Reflection

This project was especially rewarding because my PM and I pitched the initiative from the ground up. My diagrams and flowcharts made the underlying complexity visible, helping the broader organization empathize with the user experience.

By collaborating closely with engineers to map the system logic, and by presenting early solutions as interaction flows, we surfaced constraints early, avoided late-stage surprises, and kept the team focused on the right problem.

If I were to revisit this project, I would push harder for a bulk “Mark as Reviewed” action. The need surfaced during usability testing, and post-launch feedback confirmed it. In hindsight, I should have dug deeper into the behavior and advocated for it more.

MVP to 2.0: Redesigning the Inbox to stop missing leads