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TL;DR:
Finished polishing the admin experience by fixing a subtle UX gap. The Pending Coach Approvals workflow worked, but wasn’t obvious. A small, intentional link made the difference — no redesign, no new logic, just clarity.

The goal

Today was about finishing something that felt off, even though it technically worked.

Admin tools don’t need to be pretty, but they do need to feel intentional. When something exists but you can’t easily find it, that’s not a feature gap — that’s friction.

What I worked on

I closed out Issue 4-6, which started as “the Pending Coaches page doesn’t work” and turned out to be something more subtle:

The page worked.
The route existed.
The view rendered correctly.

But the path to get there wasn’t obvious.

What was actually wrong

On the Manage Coaches page, the status tabs (All / Pending / Approved / Rejected) looked like navigation — but they were really just JavaScript filters.

Meanwhile, the real “Pending Coach Approvals” workflow lived on its own page.

That mismatch creates confusion:

  • one “Pending” filters
  • another “Pending” is a workflow
  • neither makes that distinction clear

If you have to stop and think, the UI already lost.

The fix

I made one intentional change:

  • “Pending Approvals” now links directly from the Manage Coaches page
  • The other tabs stay as in-page filters
  • A small “Quick filters” label clarifies the intent

No new routes.
No redesign.
No behavior changes.

Just aligning the UI with how a human expects it to behave.

What I learned

Small UX mismatches compound faster than big bugs.
If something feels confusing, treat it like a real defect — because to the user, it is.

What’s next

Milestone 4 is in a good place. The admin area is now consistent, discoverable, and predictable.

Next up will either be:

  • deeper UI spacing cleanup, or
  • stepping back and letting this settle before moving on

For today, this was a good stopping point.

Updated: