Product Design — from complex problems to three shipped products
Too see my full design process, read Improving existing products or User centred design for new products.
Summary: Brief overview of three Saas products I've designed or improved.
Clinked -> improving the existing product, building new features.
Undisclosed -> Building a bespoke M&A product for a custom client.
GoCrumble -> Building a feedback & roadmap tool.
Clinked Client Portal — SaaS
Role
First design hire (sole designer) on live B2B SaaS product.
Own design across all product stages.
Help Marketing towards achieving their goals (websites, presentations, visuals, campaigns).
Challenge
Low UX maturity -> business and development driven culture, with Customer Success as the only point of contact for user input.
Contribution & achievements
Shipped UX improvements for the existing product on a weekly basis, in an environment adverse to qualitative research: sign-up flow, platform-wide Information Architecture and Settings, weekly usability improvements, branding & customizations, UI optimizations, account & group core features, mobile app.
Designing and shipping new features from scratch: welcome tour, Kanban, subtasks, watermarking, responsive widgets, anti-churn survey.
Improved 'Tasks' feature and 'Task Options'. Based on re-usable components. Light / dark mode based on semantic tokens.
Mobile app improvements: branding, navigation, UI. New features: Kanban, account & group context.
Removing screen 'waste' on laptops from 57% to 16% [weekly usability improvements KPI]
M&A platform — bespoke enterprise solution [undisclosed client]
Challenge:
"Build a custom M&A platform on top of Clinked, competing directly with an established market leader."
Role
Sole designer. Business Analysis, UX Research, Product Design & Management
Contribution & achievements
Validated design hypothesis against client success criteria with usability testing on a benchmark prototype across key tasks (interviews with representative users (domain experts)).
"Make our product better than competition on advanced task management" — Usability testing insights from representative users, using competitor product as a benchmark for success criteria.
Making sure Development understands the conceptual model of task dependencies — interactive prototypes and instructional videos created to convey complex dependency logic to development.
Production-ready interactive prototype — Final UI validated designs for multi-level tasks with dependencies, ready for production.
Go Crumble — White label Feedback & Roadmap tool
Challenge:
"Build a Canny alternative for our use, but also to sell it."
Minimal resources — dev-led MVP build.
Role
Sole designer in a team of 2 (me and one developer)
Product Design, Web Design
Contribution
Competitive market research to determine the right competitors.
Workshop — feature scoping for MVP.
Product, UI and website design.
3 rounds of usability fixes on a live MVP.
Desk research to determine realistic business capability constraints. Workshop facilitation to choose the right niche and to scope an MVP of features.
Main Product UI after three rounds of usability fixes on a live MVP.
Feedback card UI in detail page view. The AI score is a customizable synthesis of company strategy drivers, feasibility, and internal roadmap.
Too see my full design process, read Improving existing products or User centred design for new products.