Interact
My current employer is a B2B software firm - providing an intranet platform designed to enhance collaboration and workflows across organisations.
challenges
With a mature and evolving platform, Interact have faced several challenges during my years at the company:
Inconsistencies Across the Platform: Years of incremental development have resulted in design inconsistencies across the UI.
Scattered Feedback Channels: Feedback from clients, internal stakeholders, and support tickets were often unorganised and unprioritised, making it difficult to identify actionable insights.
Customisability vs. Usability: Clients require extensive customisation options without sacrificing user-friendliness or functionality.
Process Gaps in Collaboration: The design and development teams need clear workflows and communication to streamline delivery.
Evolving Client Needs: Clients require strategic guidance for launching and optimising their intranet platforms.
solutions
Process Shaping and Team Enablement:The first change I was tasked with as a Senior Designer was to increase consistency and parity across the B2B Design Teams' methods of working.
Product Design: I then established the key UX design processes that Product should follow for key feature rollouts and UI/UX ehancements - ensuring a user focused methodology was adopted.
Design System (0 to 1): Led the creation of Interact’s first comprehensive design system from the ground up, addressing platform inconsistencies and enabling alignment between Engineering and Product.
User Testing: I conducted online User Testing and rounds of feedback to gather results that would directly informing design decisions, ensuring features met user needs and minimised friction.
Client Guidance and Strategic Planning: Creation of our strategy guides/design training materials and launch considerisations for our customers.
A breakdown of my contributions:
During my years at Interact, I’ve worn different hats and worked across multiple departments. My main contributions have been within the Product Team, Professional Services (B2B client-side), and Technical Support.
1. Process Shaping and Team Enablement
Process Playbook Creation: I created a UX Process Playbook to guide the team through consistent workflows. This document outlined essential stages, recommended tools, and best practices - helping different teams to align better.
Support Team Collaboration: I established workflows for logging customised hotfixes and coordinating them with the JIRA system, creating a transparent and consistent process for addressing client-specific issues.
Feedback Categorisation: I created categories for sorting and analyzing support tickets into UX feedback categories. This initiative highlighted recurring trends and enabled data-driven prioritisation of product improvements.
Internal Adoption: Secured buy-in from leadership for these changes, demonstrating how they could directly support product evolution and client satisfaction.
2. Design System Creation
To address platform inconsistencies, I co-created a comprehensive design system for Interact’s Engineering and Product Design teams.
Research and Feedback Gathering: Conducted user interviews with key clients, analysed support themes, and distributed internal surveys to identify recurring UI pain points and prioritise issues.
Flexible and Scalable Foundation: Designed a brand-agnostic system that balanced clean, user-friendly defaults with flexibility for client customisation. Each element was developed with dual considerations: its default form and its acceptable level of custom styling.
Collaboration and Documentation: Worked closely with developers to ensure smooth implementation, creating guidelines for designers and developers on how to apply the system across projects.
Outcome: The design system significantly improved platform consistency, reduced development time for new features, and provided a scalable framework for client-specific customisation.
3. Product Feature Rollouts
As I moved further into the Product Unit, I led the UX design process for several key feature rollouts, ensuring they were intuitive and aligned with user needs.
Major Projects:
Designed and implemented a Timeline UI for improved content visibility and user engagement.
Redesigned various flows within the content authoring experience, making it more streamlined and accessible for non-technical users.
Developed a new tabular administration layout for power users, enabling easier management of data and settings.
Outcomes: These features received positive feedback from users and stakeholders, enhancing usability and overall satisfaction with the platform. Many customer sites saw a significant increase in user engagement.
4. User Testing
Methods Used: Conducted moderated and unmoderated usability tests on prototypes, collecting a mix of qualitative and quantitative feedback.
Affinity Mapping: Organised user pain points into thematic categories, using Notion to document the insights for feature improvements.
Outcome: Testing results directly informed design decisions, ensuring features met user needs and minimised friction.
5. Client Guidance and Strategic Planning
Guidance Development: Co-created strategy guides for clients to assist with content prioritisation, audience identification, and team readiness for intranet launches.
Launch Support: Provided actionable advice on hierarchy planning and best practices for content gathering, helping clients maximise the value of their intranet.
01
Professional Services Work: An ever-present part of the role - I've partnered with our B2B clients across enterprise, mid-sized, and startup organisations, delivering design solutions and UX/technical support to meet their specific intranet needs.
02
As the team grew, I put together a Process Playbook for our UX Processes to ensure a consistent approach.This proved particularly key for new features, ensuring we were consistent: starting with a clear problem statement, setting success criteria, then later design exploration.
03
I designed the first iteration of our design system documentation site before we settled upon a Storybook and Figma integration. I have structured our Figma file so that it is user-friendly to both designers and non-techy users (whom have read access).
04
Before and occasionally after the implementation of the Design System, I provided technical specifications to the Engineering team to ensure consistency in Product UX.
05
Feature Rollout: Our new content-authoring experience was a vast improvement on the predescessor. And went through multiple iterations.
06
Feature Rollout: I designed a new Product Timeline Widget, that saught to increase collaboration and buy-in amongst internal teams.
07
I created user testing guidance for the team as we grew. And conducted test plans on both prototypes and existing product functions, conducting online moderated tests to get customer insight.
08
I provided guidance internally and to our clients, drawing on my experience across multiple departments and strategic learnings.
wrap up:
Increased Platform Consistency: The design system’s implementation standardised visual and functional elements, helping the platform to be more intuitive and cohesive.
Improved Client Customisation: This empowered clients to tailor their intranets in a much more standardised manner - without compromising our product's foundations.
Streamlined Processes: Internal teams adopted more consistent workflows, reducing inefficiencies and fostering collaboration across departments.
Enhanced Client Success: Strategic planning and guidance equipped clients with the tools and knowledge to launch and sustain successful intranet platforms.
My time at Interact has allowed me to grow as a UX designer, tackling complex, multi-layered challenges across a large-scale platform. From creating scalable systems to delivering impactful features, I developed a deeper understanding of balancing user needs, business goals, and technical constraints. These experiences continue to inform my approach to solving design challenges with empathy and strategy.
