CASE STUDY: 2013-2015
Embarking on a journey of profound change, I spearheaded a comprehensive transformation in UI/UX, branding, and corporate culture at BrightEdge. It led to compelling case studies, user accolades, and a significant boost in Net Promoter Score (NPS) resulting in business retention and revenue growth.
Background
In 2012, BrightEdge, an enterprise SEO platform founded in 2007, faced intense competitive and market pressures with design being a key problem. In its early stages, the platform was primarily developed by engineers and PMs. Recognizing the need for a design leader, the founders brought me in to build and lead the UI/UX function and lead the design transformation.
My Approach
I crafted a 5-step strategic approach to lead the transformation, ensuring a calculated framework to maximize impact:
- Understanding Existing State of Affairs
- Crafting a Design Strategy with a Timeline
- Leading Teams and Execution
- Implementing and Monitoring KPIs
- Conclusion and Charting the Path Forward
1. Understanding Existing State of Affairs
As the first design person in the company, I conducted a comprehensive review of the market landscape, competitors, BrightEdge product offerings, and the company culture.
- Market Landscape: During this time, the world was rapidly embracing mobile-first designs, placing a clear emphasis on user experience. However, many enterprise software solutions had yet to fully recognize the importance of UX. Nonetheless, users’ increasing exposure to intuitive interfaces through smartphones and consumer applications was also shifting expectations toward enterprise software. This growing demand for seamless and user-friendly experiences underscored the urgent need for enterprises to prioritize UX in their software solutions.
- Competitive Challenges: BrightEdge, as a pioneer in SEO software, faced emerging competition in the market. These new entrants capitalized on UX differentiation to gain a competitive advantage, resulting in BrightEdge losing ground in crucial deals. Moreover, there was a perception in the market that BrightEdge lacked a design-centric approach.
- Existing Product Offering: Initially, the platform was developed for early adopters of the technology who possessed a high tolerance for learning curves and product complexity. However, as the product transitioned towards the early majority, user feedback indicated an expectation for better designs that are easier to use.
- Company Culture and Processes: Software and features were developed based on what sells (buyer focus) and the requests of the largest customers (early adopter bias), leaving many users unsatisfied and significant opportunities for SMBs untapped. I uncovered a notable absence of design processes in product development. The scope was limited to what PMs and engineers deemed appropriate for individual product offerings, resulting in inconsistencies and substantial UX gaps across the entire platform.
Internally, a prevailing sentiment existed that the platform’s design was subpar. This perception adversely affected sales, customer success, and support teams’ ability to position the platform effectively on the UX front. This assessment provided me with the groundwork for the strategic approach that I followed.
2. Crafting a Design Strategy with a Timeline
I formulated an informed strategy to lead the transformation on multiple fronts, establishing milestones along the timeline. Taking into account the problems, I forged a four-pronged approach with an 18-month timeline to lead the transformation through a series of updates and multiple reveals with a feedback loop to iterate.
- Design Processes: Integrate essential design practices, UX guidelines, checklists, and reviews into the product development process within the first few sprints. Then, iterate and revise to bring design maturity to the processes, bridging siloes and driving consistent design with a UX focus over the next year and a half.
- Design Projects: Identify design projects with separate teams to execute in parallel, focusing on short, medium, and long term goals to drive improvements for existing customers, new customers, and overall UX.
- Design Team: Define a long-term design vision and establish hiring methodologies, mentoring practices, and budget allocations to build a team covering the various skill sets needed to execute the strategy.
- Culture and Narrative: Leverage events, launches, product announcements, and various communication channels to steadily shift the internal culture to be design-centric and control the narrative in the company and the market to establish BrightEdge as a design-first company.
3. Leading Teams and Execution
Led parallel efforts to execute the strategy to deliver the transformation. Following the existing 5-week release cycle, created a plan for the 15 releases, spanning 18 months to turn around the platform.
- Collaboration: Worked with product management, engineering, customer success, support, and sales team, establishing regular cadence for sync-ups and information sharing on the design items. Building a robust framework for gathering feedback, recruiting users for testing, and socializing the designs early to manage change and iterate before releasing broadly.
- Team: Worked with executives to get budget and headcount based on the UX vision, established recruitment processes for hiring designers, and built the initial team within a year and a half to cover all the required skills needed to execute the vision.
- Branding: Established the value for re-branding as a means to reshape the narrative around design, Worked with executives and marketing team to develop a new brand identity with a clear brand promise to focus on UX and design. Led the effort to develop all the collateral, website redesign, and overall branding overhaul, managing the change throughout the company.
- Design System: Build a design system in line with the new branding, defining typography, colors, design elements, UI components, and design guidelines based on UX principles. Led the team to update major components like navigation, data-tables, charts, reporting filters, and the common user workflows to drive consistency and usability improvements across the platform.
- Voice of Customer: Led a team to focus on short-term and immediate action items in each release. Gathering continuous user feedback and UX paint points, working with customer success and support teams. And continuously fixing the issues with each release, building momentum to establish a belief in the users that they are being heard and the company cares about the UX.
- Core Product Redesign: Analyzing the core products within the platform and establishing the need for redesign in the medium and long term. Led the team on a series of projects, optimized based on the user requirements, business impact, resources, and implementation time. Covered the key areas with the redesign and innovations within the first year and a half providing the biggest impact and informing the strategy for the following years.
4. Implementing and Monitoring KPIs
Defined KPI for platform usage, product adoption, task completion rates, user ratings, and qualitative feedback analysis. Leveraged Google Analytics, custom APIs, and platform logs to build a system to measure and continuously monitor these KPIs. We used these KPIs to gauge the impact of the transformation with feedback channels to respond promptly to user inputs, turning detractors into promoters with each update. All this led to achievements like:
- Increased competitive deal success.
- Improved NPS scores with accolades for design.
- Shifted internal and external perceptions from a design laggard to a design-first company.
5. Conclusion and Charting the Path Forward
The transformation at BrightEdge not only elevated the company’s UX standing but also reshaped its internal and external identity. The bigger vision of reshaping the whole platform to be best in UX and usability was still a long journey and we conducted a retrospect to understand what worked and what didn’t and charted the path forward
- Culture and narrative change turned out to be a much bigger impact factor.
- Updating components and responding to direct pain points yielded better short-term results.
- Redesign of the individual product offering was ambitious and we could only do a few key product updates within the timeframe, rest would be done in the subsequent releases with industry-defining innovations.
- Buy-in from executive leadership made it easier to collaborate and align the teams toward a common goal.
Visuals & Media
Building a new design system.
Screenshots of the updated products in the platform.
Branding and redesigning the website.
