Powerful features hidden behind poor UX.
WISK develops venue inventory software. When I joined as the first design hire, the product targeting liquor inventory was already existing and profitable, but had an extremely hard time with long-term retention. Existing users who remained and new users who churned all expressed a lot of frustration and confusion due to an unintuitive UI and UX patterns that contradicted their instincts. This happened due to the product being built solely by engineering, without any product team for input. On the marketing side, their site and branding were outdated, and their social outreach strategy was hurting because of it. I knew coming in that big changes had to be made, and a scalable foundation had to be laid to expand the product into what would eventually turn into WISK Food.
Research first, constraints second, pixels third.
Touching an existing, complex product with active, paying users is a delicate process. I knew changes had to be made very carefully, to address known pain points without breaking the flows that were working for people. I conducted primary UX Research as my first step, talking to venue owners and employees who ran inventory weekly, studying their pain points. Secondary research followed, and once I analyzed the data, I started the redesign.
I consulted with the CTO and Engineering Lead on each step, as we needed to meet in the middle to make changes fast, but not to the detriment of the tech stack and codebase integrity. This meant certain pixel-perfect changes were not always possible, which was an invaluable lesson in adapting in real-time to non-ideal design situations that inevitably happen in every role.
The redesign started with the brand identity and styling components — the goal was to reflect a clean and simple solution, which is what the redesign as a whole was aiming for. I created the new logotype with inspiration from their old logo, to keep familiarity with our existing userbase. For colors, I opted for a bright blue palette which stayed unintrusive throughout the complex descriptions and features, and allowed important error and warning messages to be easily highlighted. The typography followed simplicity, with a sans-serif typeface that allowed for fast reading and skimming, essential for a product with complex dashboards with lots of data.
After closely working with the CEO on the website and initial marketing materials, such as an ROI Calculator which helped Sales show potential new customers how much WISK could save them on lost inventory per month, I was responsible for contracting and managing engineers to build the new website. After this foundation work was done, I moved onto the cross-platform redesign.
WISK's most powerful tool, online & offline inventory, is possible due to the mobile app. I redesigned it with special focus on the onboarding and inventory flows to create better UX for both venue owners & employees. After changes and optimization, the sign-ups increased ~25% on the first month, and conversion from free trials to paying users went up exponentially each month.
The web app was the most complex work: managers and owners used it for batch ordering, inventory reviews, and in-depth analysis of their bottles. It was also the most outdated part of the product. Meeting in the middle with engineering, I refactored and simplified the IA of the product, removing repetition and unifying sections that directly impacted each other. The dashboard was redone to improve legibility and quick skimming, and the most complex data areas (inventories, venue items, item details, analytics reports, and recipe management) were carefully redone, keeping the general structure with a cleaner visual identity.
Other day-to-day responsibilities included managing junior and mid-level designers on a project-by-project basis, helping instate and lead the new marketing team on their first projects, and finding and managing the appropriate contractors for off-site development when our in-house developers needed extra hands.
In between the redesigns, I was able to add features that increased the value of WISK in the eyes of existing customers, such as inventory push reminders, which allowed teams to stress less about when to perform full or partial inventories. Seeing that feedback come in in real time excited us for the final redesign that was to come. As mentioned, the redesign increased our MRR by 35% within 2 months of launch, exponentially grew sign-ups over the following 6 months, and significantly lowered our churn rate.
WISK Food: Launch and 3x reach.
Following the successful redesign, we were able to develop WISK Food, allowing for inventory of food items down to the raw ingredients. During this project, I was responsible for hiring and managing mid-level and junior designer contractors and engineers to assist our team towards a fast launch. This fractional team and I worked on the website marketing and upselling WISK Food, WISK Food’s branding, and the product development itself. The process for this was thorough:
Venue owners, staff doing the weekly count — both groups from existing venues that handled food, and food-exclusive venues.
Discussed the business goals and expected results closely with the CTO and CEO. Worked extensively with the Engineering team to ensure the designs could be easily implemented with our existing stack.
I started with wireframes and feature documentation, validated with the team, and then moved on to hi-fis. Directed contracted designers as they helped with smaller, repetitive tasks.
Once the team and I were happy with the new product offering, I finished writing the technical specs, led a presentation of the whole suite of features, and handed off the deliverables to engineering. I stayed in constant contact with engineers, answering any questions, and adapting to any issues that came up during development.
We launched WISK Food to our existing customer base with an exclusive early offer, to gather initial feedback and validate the viability of the product. We incorporated said feedback before the general launch.
WISK Food was incredibly successful, with roughly 40% of our existing customers being upsold the WISK Food product, and expanding our venue reach threefold.
