tuneup.design creative unit

BRAND THEME EDITOR

AUTOMATION | B2B

Background

Software company that builds tools to help businesses turn paperwork and manual processes into digital, automated workflows. Convert forms into interactive digital experiences, automates customer onboarding, data collection, and approvals, adds electronic signatures and build end-to-end workflows without heavy development.

Upon joining the company, I led a usability study of the first SMB version of the new product — with two month until launch. The product had a long track record in the enterprise space, helping large organizations build and manage their digital document workflows. This new version marked the company's first step toward serving small and medium-sized businesses — and adapting an enterprise-grade product for SMB users meant rethinking core assumptions about user sophistication, available time, and tolerance for complexity.

USER STORY

"As a user, I want to quickly and independently customize the product to reflect my brand identity, so that I can avoid both the steep learning curve of complex tool and the cost of dedicated customer support — enabling SMBs to onboard efficiently without relying on external resources."

MAIN GOAL

Since the new version was built on top of an existing product rather than from scratch, the central design challenge was navigating a three-way tension: leveraging the existing codebase and established look and feel to reduce development costs and flatten the learning curve — without sacrificing the level of perceived quality needed to compete in the SMB market, where alternatives are plentiful and first impressions are decisive.

PAIN POINTS

I conducted 8 observational interviews with representatives of the target audience — some well-acquainted with the enterprise version of the product, others encountering the branding theme editor for the first time. After analyzing all sessions, I compiled and prioritized a list of pain points by severity. The following two proved foundational — together, they define the core usability failure of the current solution:

My north star was consistency at every level: navigation grounded in users' existing mental models, and a unified interaction pattern across all configuration types — so that learning how to edit one thing meant knowing how to edit everything.

REDESIGN AND VERSIONS COMPARISON

What follows is a series of before-and-after design comparisons. Each pairing leads with the proposed redesign, followed by the original version — making explicit which pain points were identified and how the new design resolves them.

PAGES AREA

BRAND MEDIA AREA

BRAND COMMON AREA - COLORS

BRAND COMMON AREA - TYPOGRAPHY

BRAND COMPONENTS - CHECKBOX

MY JOURNEY

This project was never shipped. I chose to include it nonetheless — user testing yielded strong feedback, and the version that launched in its place has struggled to gain meaningful traction in the market a year on.