Turning around a stalled Product Builder
Bringing clarity, alignment and a better user experience to a complex utility product configuration tool.
Product Builder — redesigned configuration experience
01 / THE CHALLENGE
A project in trouble. An opportunity to rethink it.
When I joined Gentrack, Product Builder was already significantly behind schedule. Repeated design reviews hadn't resolved the issues, stakeholders were growing frustrated, and pressure to deliver was mounting. Although I'd joined to work across the wider product suite, I quickly spotted an opportunity to rethink the rigid wizard, its confusing structure and overall experience. I shared my ideas with my manager and went on to take ownership of the entire redesign, all while finding my feet in a new company and industry.
THE CONTEXT
Plenty of reviews. Still no shared direction.
With the project already under pressure, it would have been easy to keep refining the existing designs. But I felt we needed to understand why previous approaches weren't working before committing to another direction.
WHAT I WAS WORKING WITH
THE RESET
Start with the problem, not another solution.
I brought the team together through a Lean UX workshop to surface assumptions, align on the problems worth solving and establish a shared direction. That gave us a stronger basis for research, testing and design decisions.
02 / RESEARCH & TESTING
Finding out what actually worked.
With a clearer direction emerging, I needed to understand how users approached product configuration, test our assumptions and make sure the redesign worked for the people who would actually use it.
GETTING CLOSER TO USERS
Learning how the work really happens.
Field studies helped us understand the people, tasks and context behind product configuration. Rather than designing around an assumed workflow, we could ground our decisions in how users thought about the work.
PUTTING IDEAS TO THE TEST
Testing the mental model, not just the screens.
I ran two rounds of usability testing to understand how people navigated the wizard and interacted with its components. In the first round, users struggled to identify where they could drag and drop elements. I introduced subtle pulsing ripples behind draggable nodes and drop zones to make these interactions more discoverable. The second round confirmed that the changes made the interactions easier to understand, so we retained them in the proposed design.
FROM INSIGHT TO INTERACTION
THE TURNING POINT
Users expected a journey. The product wasn't linear.
People looked for a clear sequence of steps, but product configuration involved relationships and decisions that didn't always follow one path. A rigid wizard risked hiding important flexibility. The challenge became finding a way to provide guidance without forcing everyone through the same sequence.
THE DESIGN RESPONSE
Guide people without forcing a single path.
We shifted towards a more connected representation of the product, with clearer relationships and contextual guidance. The aim was to help people understand where they were and what needed attention, without oversimplifying the system.
Making complexity easier to navigate.
The original experience relied on large, disconnected component cards, making it difficult to see how different parts of a product related to one another. I explored a more connected visual model that brought those relationships into view, while giving users clearer ways to navigate, inspect and configure individual components.
↗ Enlarge06 / OUTCOMES & REFLECTION
Getting the project moving again.
Product Builder started with a team that hadn't yet agreed on the right direction. Through research, workshops and iterative testing, we developed a clearer understanding of how users approached product configuration and what the experience needed to support. The work gave the team a shared direction and a more considered foundation for taking the product forward.
What changed
A shared direction
Brought different stakeholder perspectives together around a clearer understanding of the problem.
A more intuitive model
Reworked how product components and their relationships were represented, informed by research and testing.
A foundation to build on
Established a design direction that could support further development of Product Builder.
What I took away
One of the biggest lessons from Product Builder was that good design work doesn't automatically translate into a good final product. I'm proud of the direction we developed and the research that informed it. But seeing parts of the experience stripped back during implementation reinforced how important it is to stay involved beyond handoff, work closely with engineering and protect the interactions that are essential to the user experience. It's something I've carried into how I approach product design since.
05 / KEEP EXPLORING
There's more to the story.
Every project brings a different kind of challenge. Take a look at what I worked on next.
