SaaS Analytics Dashboard UX Redesign
B2B SaaS Analytics Platform
The client's analytics platform had genuinely powerful features, but new users rarely found them. Onboarding dragged on, activation was low, and support was fielding a steady stream of "how do I..." tickets for things the product already did well. Bricksense ran a full UX engagement — research, redesign, and validation — to rebuild the product around how customers actually work rather than how the engineering team had originally organised it.
The Challenge
The dashboard had grown feature by feature over several years, with each addition bolted onto the existing navigation. The result was an information architecture that made sense to the team that built it and to almost no one else — key reports were three menus deep, similar actions lived in different places depending on which team had shipped them, and the same data appeared in slightly different forms in different screens.
New users had to work through a lengthy setup flow before they saw any value, and the product offered little guidance once they were in. Trial users were converting at well below the team's target, and churn in the first 90 days was concentrated among accounts that had never really activated.
The team had tried isolated fixes — a new tooltip here, a reordered menu there — but without a shared model of the user's actual workflow, each fix tended to solve one symptom while leaving the underlying structure untouched.
Our Approach
User research and journey mapping
Interviews and session recordings with active, lapsed, and trial users surfaced the handful of jobs people actually hire the product to do, and where the current design worked against them.
Information architecture rebuild
Navigation and terminology were reorganised around those jobs rather than around internal team boundaries, with card-sorting and tree-testing used to validate the new structure before any screens were designed.
A real design system
Components, patterns, and interaction rules were documented in a shared design system, so new screens stayed consistent and shipped faster instead of each one being designed from scratch.
Prototype, test, refine
Clickable prototypes of the redesigned onboarding and core dashboard were usability-tested with real target users across two rounds before a line of production code was written.
The Solution
The redesigned product leads new users through a short, guided setup that gets them to a first meaningful result quickly, then introduces advanced features progressively rather than all at once. The dashboard itself was reorganised around three core jobs the research identified, with consistent patterns for filtering, exporting, and drilling into data wherever they appear.
A documented design system now governs how new features get designed, which has cut design-to-development handoff time and kept the product visually and behaviourally consistent as new modules ship.
What We Delivered
- End-to-end UX research: interviews, session analysis, and journey mapping
- A validated information architecture and navigation model
- A documented design system and component library
- Redesigned onboarding flow and core dashboard screens
- Two rounds of usability testing with target users
- Developer-ready prototypes and interaction specifications
The Results
Median time to first meaningful action fell 58% after the new onboarding shipped, and 90-day activation rose 64% as more trial users reached the point where the product proved its value.
First-90-day churn dropped 27% and the product's Net Promoter Score rose 32 points, with usability specifically called out in follow-up surveys as the reason.
Support tickets related to navigation and "how do I" questions fell sharply, and the new design system has let the product team ship new features faster without the inconsistency that used to creep in.
We knew the product was good. We did not know how much of that was hidden behind a confusing interface until the redesign shipped and activation jumped overnight.