01The challenge
rapidmail's user satisfaction was declining. An outdated design failed to showcase the product's features, the visual style was rigid, and customers were left with unanswered questions about how things worked. Leadership recognised this needed a complete feature overhaul, not a coat of paint.
Research pointed clearly at what users wanted: better information accessibility, simpler navigation, more design flexibility, and deeper engagement with the product itself.
02Understanding users
- Mined the evidence. Analysed support tickets and comparative reviews to surface the real, recurring pain points.
- Ran cross-team workshops. Brought customer support, leadership and product together to align on problems and priorities.
- Listened at scale. Distributed targeted surveys to existing users.
- Built emotional personas. Developed personas grounded in qualitative data and emotional cues, not just demographics.
03Design & process
I mapped user journeys across every planned feature, explored structure through wireframes, and built clickable prototypes in UXPin. Internal usability testing with stakeholders drove continuous iteration before anything reached development.
- Brand personality. Identified rapidmail's traits (creativity, approachability, fun) and translated them into a visual and interactive language.
- A secure, modern platform. Delivered a state-of-the-art, secure platform for form building and e-commerce integration that lifted lead generation.
- A reproducible design system. Packaged it all into a system that became the company's unified visual language across every touchpoint.
- Interactivity from behaviour. Mouseflow data showed users clicking feature titles, so I redesigned navigation to reward that discovery.
The design system stopped being "the design team's files" and became how the whole company spoke.
04Ways of working
I rolled features out in phases, prioritising the highest-impact elements first, and partnered with the Business Intelligence team on A/B testing and analysis. To keep delivery fast, I developed a prioritisation framework that accelerated planning threefold and enabled quicker cross-functional execution.
05Impact
Users described the platform as engaging and easy to use. Stakeholders embraced the design system as the company's visual language, and the team came out more collaborative than it went in.