ENTERPRISE SAAS • B2B • AI
NICE CXone
Designing enterprise-grade contact center tools for 1M+ agents where clarity under pressure matters.
ROLE
Senior UX Designer
SCOPE
Product design, UX research, design systems, AI tooling
PLATFORM
Enterprise SaaS, Agent Desktop, B2B
The gap between powerful and usable is where the design lives.
THE PROBLEM
NICE CXone is the #1 cloud contact center platform globally with 85 of the Fortune 100 who depend on it, and over 1M+ agents use it every day. The platform achieved 7 consecutive years as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for CCaaS, ahead of Genesys, Five9, and Amazon.
When I joined NICE, they had just acquired a new product line focused on native social media channel integration. I was tasked with designing CXone Agent a unified agent desktop that would merge existing workflows with entirely new ones, while supporting agents across voice, chat, email, SMS, and social simultaneously.
The primary challenge wasn't features. It was coherence. Agents needed to understand system state instantly, act quickly, and trust the interface during long, high-pressure sessions where a single moment of confusion has real consequences for the customer on the other end.
"In a contact center, every second of friction is a second the customer is waiting. Craft means the agent never has to think about the tool, only the customer."
+ 80 of the Fortune 100
Discovery first.
Coherence always.
PROCESS
Discovery
I started with a competitive analysis and a round of stakeholder and user interviews on-site and remotely across both legacy and newly acquired product lines. The goal was to figure out how to blend traditional call center workflows with the dynamics of social media interactions. The response and resolution expectations for a phone call are fundamentally different from an async social thread.
Understanding those distinctions early shaped everything that followed. We encouraged stakeholders to connect directly with user research, asking each to identify the features they believed would most support each user group.
Design implication
The competitive landscape confirms that NICE's primary design challenge wasn't feature parity, it was usability at depth. While NICE consistently leads, competitors outscores NICE on agent ease-of-use despite having fewer native capabilities. The goal was to make a powerful platform feel learnable, not to add features that competitors already had.
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"She writes calls handled and cases handled by hand every day in a notebook." - Alisha G · Mindbody
DESIGN IMPACT
Persistent notes, stable daily metrics, and interaction history became non-negotiable requirements, not enhancements.
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"Seeing people waiting doesn't make me work faster, it just makes me more on edge." - Sydney A · Extra Space Storage
DESIGN IMPACT
Queue and performance panels were redesigned with agent-level visibility controls, distinguishing status awareness from load anxiety.
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"Learning a new system like this would take hours." - Amber Santy · Extra Space Storage
Omnichannel rollout was reframed as a progressive disclosure problem, with onboarding moments built into the channel-switching flow itself.
Understanding the day of agents and supervisors
In the early discovery phase, my team and I mapped the full day of both agents and their supervisors. Every phase, every handoff, every communication need between roles. This insight drove the design of the notification and messaging system, letting agents reach out for help or offer assistance without losing focus on active interactions.
Contact centers varied significantly by industry: the depth of customer knowledge, the quality of service expectations, and the time spent per interaction were all different. The design needed to feel familiar but flex to accommodate those differences.
North star & asynchronous interactions
A North Star document was created and referenced in every sprint and design review. It helped us stay focused on the vision we worked hard to understand and maintain. After multiple iterations and user tests, we developed a hybrid model: async interactions paired with other channels resolved like traditional items; pure async interactions could stay open longer, following their natural flow.
Design Impact
Async channels share a queue with voice but resolve differently, requiring consistent closure patterns, channel-aware status models, and persistent case history as core design requirements, not enhancements.
CXone Agent: the unified workspace
CXone Agent was designed as a single application supporting a wide range of agent workflows, from identity verification to issue resolution across 30+ channel types. The interaction space was a first of its kind: agents could add a second communication channel to an ongoing interaction without opening a new case. The app space was fully configurable, holding a shift schedule, interaction history, directory, full assignment queue, and real-time AI coaching, with each tool openable in its own window.
Which leads us into a guidance tool I designed: Real-Time Interaction Guidance.
Real-Time Interaction Guidance
Alongside CXone Agent, I led the design of Real-Time Interaction Guidance. It is an AI-powered tool that surfaces live coaching tips, sentiment signals, and next-best-action prompts during active calls. The core challenge was determining what information matters in the moment, when it should appear, and how it should be presented so it supports rather than disrupts agent focus.
The experience integrated directly into Salesforce, making real-time guidance available inside the CRM workflows agents were already using. It required working with Salesforce team, PMs, and understanding the Salesforce’s Lightning design system and designing it in a way that blended in with the rest of the Salesforce experience. At NICE, we design for trust when the system is live and the stakes are real.
Design system, research & mentorship
Throughout both products, I conducted on-site and remote user research: quantitative and qualitative, including moderated usability testing with agents and supervisors across client organizations. I built and evolved the design system and component library to improve accessibility and consistency at enterprise scale, and mentored junior designers on UX principles, interaction patterns, and design standards.
Working at NICE deepened my approach to design leadership in ambiguity. What I mean by that is the way of understanding how to bring order to complex systems through clarity, systems thinking, and close cross-functional collaboration.
Enterprise scale.
Human clarity.
OUTCOMES
Frost &
Sullivan
2022 NORTH AMERICAN ENTERPRISE CLOUD CONTACT CENTER
NICE CXone Named Leader in Frost and Sullivan’s 2022 North American Enterprise Cloud Contact Center Report.
#1
GARTNER MAGIC QUADRANT
NICE CXone is named a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader for CCaaS year after year the only vendor recognized as a Leader in both CCaaS and Workforce Engagement Management, positioned furthest for completeness of vision.
99.99%
PLATFORM AVAILABILITY
Designed within a platform guaranteeing 99.99% uptime with zero maintenance downtime, certified for PCI Level 1, GDPR, HIPAA, and FedRAMP, compliance requirements that shaped every design decision.
Featured Work
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01 NICE
Led UX for the #1 cloud contact center platform designing omnichannel routing and AI-powered agent tool used by Verizon, Visa, Disney, and Toyota with Salesforce integration.
ENTERPRISE SAAS · B2B · AI
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02 Kingdom Studios
Built the design system from zero for an innovative platform supporting 1B+ transactions with token swaps, staking, NFT marketplace, wallet, and mobile across millions of users.
0 → 1 · UX STRATEGY · WEB3
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03 meta.us
Established branding and scalable design systems for a global competitive esports platform founded by ex-Blizzard directors, optimizing responsive performance across markets.
ESPORTS · BRANDING · GLOBAL
CONTACT
Let's make
something great.
Maye is a product designer based in Maui designing intuitive experiences for complex products, with deep expertise in UX, design systems, and interaction design.