Project date: 2023 February - 2025 August
Teamhood is a powerful project management platform offering a wide range of tools, including Gantt charts, advanced Kanban boards, dashboards, reports, etc. I joined the company as a lead product designer to improve user activation and to help innovate and refine the overall product experience. Early research revealed that problems were nested much deeper—users were struggling with fundamental usability and had trouble discovering the value of the product.
Key contributions:
Main challenges:
After running the initial heuristic usability evaluation, I've found some glaring issues, but I didn't want to base everything on my own observation, so it was time to run some usability testing. I met with a few people who broadly fit the product target audience, and the results weren’t surprising:
Users didn’t understand some of the terminology and were hesitant to click anything. One user asked “Why I can’t I choose multiple...?”
The UI depictions next to the list of options didn’t help users understand how it resembles their choices. One user said “Are they trying to show that they have a calculator...?”
Eight steps of text-heavy guide showed no effect to help the users navigate. It was quickly scanned through or ignored.
After landing in the workspace, users seemed completely lost and were hesitant to click anything. Some clicked around randomly, trying to figure out what was what, but there was very little meaningful engagement with the product.
After the testing, I decided to show participants a few competitor tools to see how they were perceived. This helped clarify the issues and point toward a solution: we needed to bridge user input during setup into the workspace or let them pick pre-made examples that they can start using.
I designed a flow that gradually connected the setup process with the actual interface by asking users what they wanted to achieve and showing a live preview on the right side of the screen.
To help users get started effectively, I presented two options: "Start with a template" or "Start from scratch". During session recording observations, I noticed that some users changed their mind midway through setup, so I made it simple to switch to templates at any point.
I created a form asking for basic “to-do” input and their prefered plan view. Later, this helped the users immediately recognize their work items and build a mental model of the workspace.
Usability testing showed that users desperately needed guidance and external motivators when starting out.
To keep users motivated, I introduced a checklist based on their input during the setup, guiding them through core features and unique strong points of the tool. The users get to know the tool by actually using it. To make it more rewarding, I proposed to give away one month free once the user completes it, but we ended up skipping this because of problematic implementation.
The visual representation of user's input and work items immediately looked familiar.
Initially, I suggested an interactive guide implementation as a Quick start, but the scope turned out too big. As an alternative, we decided to represent the active Quick start task as a modal with video and help text. This helped users find tools that were nested deeper in the menus.
The changes were well received, and session recordings confirmed that users no longer froze and there was much less erratic clicking around.
During user observations, we noticed that some users struggled to understand the visual hierarchy and the purpose of certain elements. While Teamhood offers advanced features such as sub-statuses and dependencies, these proved to be less intuitive and harder to grasp for some new users.
Some new users struggled to understand the visual representation of expanded (or "mounted") parent statuses with sub-status columns displaying child items. We observed significant usability issues where users attempted to use the feature but failed.
In Kanban cards, dependencies were displayed like labels, each with its own prefix and icon. While this was normal for advanced users, new users found it unintuitive—another element on the screen that added to the visual noise.
I redesigned the parent item to look and function like a container, with child items visually belonging to it.
I represented dependencies as clickable entries in a "rake" style list, creating a clear visual hierarchy.
These changes were well received by both new and existing users. We received praise for the improved layout and visual hierarchy, noting that new employees could learn the tool much faster.
After reviewing the templates, I noticed they were overly gatekeepy in their terminology and lacked cohesive demo content to help new users understand the tool and get started quickly. Teamhood was aimed at advanced users, but some of our most loyal customers came from Excel or other non–project management tools, and we didn’t want to lose that part of the market.
New users found it difficult to understand the gatekeepy terminology, the purpose of some elements, and the poorly defined demo content. Its quality and appearance also didn’t help inspire confidence.
Our data showed that 70% of new users prefer to start with a template during setup, so it was time to really step up our template game. Working together with marketing and sales teams, who have better knowledge of our customer base, we refined the list of templates to better align with our ICP.
I first suggested an interactive sneak peek preview so users could explore each template’s layout and structure, but developing it would have significantly increased the scope. To keep things manageable, we went with a static preview instead. This approach still delivered the value of previewing templates while keeping the scope under control.
Working together with our customer support who get to see real user data every day, we managed to create meaningful demo content, such as work items, swimlane and column names, tags, etc. This helped new users understand each element as part of a real-world workflow and inspired them to create their own content.
Later user observation showed that they were much less hesitant when picking templates and were more comfortable creating their own content. Moreover, we managed to achieve this with no deep pockets, relying mostly on restructuring the content. At this point, I would have loved to do more usability testing, but it would have required more time than we could spare, and we were already confident in the outcome.
As we introduced complex rescheduling features, we needed to explain what they do.
I placed strong emphasis on clear copy to help users understand what they’re about to do. I also added simple schematics that make actions easier to process and help users recognize modals during repeated use.
Upon joining the company, I found that the design system’s maturity level was very low:
I documented and carefully reviewed the color changes with the engineers. We managed to eliminate 17 redundant colors and consolidate near-duplicate shades into unified, optimal colors, which made picking colors for the UI a lot easier.
Redesigning everything using auto-layout was a tremendous time-saver: it enabled us to make changes instantly without worrying about inconsistencies or breaking the layout. We could even make UI adjustments during brainstorming sessions.
I introduced design tokens for typography, sizes, border radii, and most importantly colors. This allowed us to switch between light and dark themes with just a couple of clicks, which was a tremendous time saver.
With these changes, we were able to deliver new designs significantly faster and in a much more consistent way. It also greatly improved collaboration with our engineers.
At the time, the branding wasn’t strong enough to support effective visual communication. I knew this wasn’t helping our conversion rates, so after discussing the problem with the CEO, I took action:
While I was on a different team, it was impossible for me to constantly keep an eye on the quality of visual communication. Still, website registrations and social media engagement showed that these changes were working.
I didn't want to make this case study too long, and tried to focus on the most important parts.
I didn't want to make this case study too long, and tried to focus on the most important parts. These changes were well received by both new and existing users. We received praise for the improved layout and visual hierarchy, noting that new employees could learn the tool much faster.
The product achieved and sustained steady growth in both revenue and new active users.
The quality of the product improved dramatically in every aspect. We received plenty of praise from our users for offering a better UX than competing tools.
The design guidelines I established helped streamline the design process for future cases.
Better prioritization of work to align with roadmap goals.
Sometimes it’s better to ship features in smaller pieces to avoid blockers and scope creep.