Switchboard Attendant Console

The Switchboard attendant console was designed as an MVP — a first version built to ship, validate, and iterate. I designed the dashboard with a desktop display in mind: a reasonable assumption for an office telephony tool used by receptionists and administrators at their workstations.

What we didn't anticipate was that some customers were displaying the Switchboard dashboard on wall-mounted LCD televisions — monitoring call volume and queue status at a glance across the office floor. The desktop layout didn't translate well to that context. Text and UI elements that worked at arm's length on a monitor became distorted and difficult to read at distance on a larger screen.

Working Within Real Constraints

Deeper iteration was limited by the nature of the product's environment. Analytics and user research were difficult to justify organizationally, and the technical barriers were real — many Sangoma systems run on closed, air-gapped networks with no internet access, making traditional usage data collection genuinely impractical. Privacy concerns weren't reflexive; they reflected the reality of enterprise telephony deployments. I understood the constraints and worked within them.

The product entered maintenance mode with a small but stable user base. Elsewhere in the product line, where those barriers didn't apply, I found lower-friction paths to the data I needed — our softphone iPhone client, for instance, offered anonymized analytics already sitting in our databases that required minimal effort to surface. You find the data where the door is open.

Designing for the Real Environment

We addressed it pragmatically. When we built additional widgets for the Switchboard, we designed them with TV display legibility in mind from the start — validating contrast and readability in our phone lab before shipping. It wasn't a full redesign, but it was a meaningful correction informed by how people were actually using the product.