Redesigning ProQuo’s app for scale

As ProQuo scaled rapidly, the platform's user experience suffered due to increasing feature complexity. These issues became apparent as customer churn rates increased and customers reported difficulty using the platform without support.

Customers told us they faced some of these challenges as reasons for churning in exit interviews:
• Complexity of data visualisations; users needed support to understand the data.
• Difficult to find the story in the data
• Navigating the product took high cognitive load
• Naming and language used in the product was confusing
• No clear workflows or order to configure the dashboards

My role was to validate the customer feedback through UX activities and to organise our efforts to gain business buy-in for adding this work to the product roadmap.

The fast-paced environment and ambitious roadmap had negatively impacted the user experience, leading to several UX challenges:

• Create a unified and simple experience that included repeatable and consistent interfaces
• Strike a balance between providing simplified workflows replacing the separated and single data views

Working with the Head of Product and CPO I devised a strategy to approach the redesign and clean up the product

Setting foundations
We began with a systematic audit of every component and element across ProQuo’s product. This gave us a clear picture of our current state and highlighted areas needing attention.

Experience direction
To guide our design evolution, we created mood boards that served both as a structural framework and a foundation for decision-making. This allowed us to consistently validate designs against our intended aesthetic.

Systematic development
I prioritised jobs to be done in a specific order:
1. Audited the existing ProQuo product by printing, cutting out and arranging similar components to define their uses and establish a baseline.
2. Researched best-in-class B2B products and created quick trials to apply our data and content in similar template
3. Prototyped and tested our concepts to gain confidence internally before approaching customers in our testing groups

I created several high-fidelity prototypes to validate the new structure and navigation, and we tested new labels and language for comprehension.

Card sorting exercises, along with 13 customer and internal tests (9 customer interviews and 4 internal team members), revealed clear patterns.
The results were:
• Simplicity in the new naming and grouping of content was understood by 100% of testers
• Repeating page structure helped users recognise what the configurations of the data
• Navigation and in-page tabs made huge difference

These changes enabled customers to easily navigate the platform and complete tasks in just two steps, reducing cognitive overload and simplifying chart configuration (previously requiring as many as five clicks to reset and view chart data).

Using Smartlook, we observed a 50% decrease in platform viewing minutes, indicating that users were now able to find information more quickly and efficiently.
• We received anecdotal customer feedback praising the updates as cleaner and easier to use
• The customer feedback was now praise not just requests for help
• Reduced number of emails to CS team
• Time spent in the app by customers
• Customer churn decreased by 15%

The potential risk was outweighed by the positive results. The success of this project was greatly facilitated by the skill of our engineering leads, who rebuilt the entire app, refactoring old code and improving accessibility, within 8 weeks of our design sprint.

Getting early buy-in with the business enabled our small team of multi-disciplined expert to speed through our process. Trust in the team and the process gave us the room to explore and refine at pace.