The side drawer
Situation
Loan agents worked a case in one place and the supporting documents lived somewhere else. Every document access meant leaving the work, navigating away, and coming back.
Constraint
The documents could not move and the case workflow could not change. The fix had to live inside the existing screen.
The decision
We had two options on the table: a documents tab (a place to go) and a side drawer (documents beside the work). I recommended the drawer. The trade-off was horizontal space; the win was that agents never left the case. An engineer pushed back on the tab approach on cost, and that pushback made the drawer the better call.
After: case workspace with a document drawer docked beside it · no navigation away.
Outcome
Agents stopped losing about 30 seconds per document access, 20 to 40 times a day (estimate, based on observed timings across roughly 250 users). The pattern spread platform-wide. It shipped in 2021 and the team still uses it daily through an acquisition. The PM calls it a legacy.
The honest scoreboard
The drawer shipped, spread beyond its first use, and outlived my time on the project. Two independent sources confirm the adoption.
A clean before/after on case completion time. We didn't instrument it. The 30-second figure is the observed basis, not telemetry.