UX research and content design
Role: Senior Product Design Manager, MessageGears
Timeline: April 2023 - January 2024
Focus areas: UX research, information architecture, content design
Background
Since December 2022, I’ve been a Senior Product Design Manager at MessageGears, a warehouse-native segmentation and customer engagement platform. Our clients include enterprise brands like Expedia, The Home Depot, and GoDaddy, with users ranging from technical teams (marketing ops, engineers) to less-technical, traditional marketers. Historically, user research at MessageGears was limited, and direct feedback from end users was rarely solicited.
The challenge
In April 2023, our CTO tasked the Design team and Product Management with identifying "quick win" UX improvements. The complexity of our platform made it difficult for Sales to demo and required significant support from Customer Success.
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To refine the problem, I co-facilitated a cross-functional workshop with Design and Product Management. We reviewed customer feedback, sales demo recordings, and conducted a user journey mapping exercise to define key personas.
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One major pain point emerged: navigation and information architecture. The primary issues included:
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Unintuitive labels: Menu items were named using technical jargon instead of industry-standard terms. For example, labels such as "Context Data", "Context API", and "Real-time Context Data" caused confusion for users.
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Illogical groupings: Navigation was structured around how the platform was sold rather than user workflows, forcing users to click through multiple sections to complete a task.
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Buried key features: Critical pages like Templates and Campaigns were hidden under multiple layers, increasing friction.
Given the high impact on user workflows, we agreed that any changes required extensive testing with both internal stakeholders and customers.
The goal: An more intuitive navigation experience
After a brief pause due to shifting priorities, the project resumed in October 2023 with renewed urgency. We were given a 90-day timeline to conduct research, iterate on solutions, and finalize designs for handoff to Engineering. Our objectives were:
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Gather internal feedback to identify pain points.
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Conduct competitive analysis to align with industry terminology and naming conventions.
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Develop and test prototypes with internal teams and external customers.
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Refine designs based on feedback and secure approval from the Product Steering Committee.
Research and data collection
Initially, our team used Maze for small-scale prototype testing, but I advocated for upgrading our subscription to enable larger-scale research.
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To maximize participation, I recommended launching a company-wide survey to:
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Identify pain points with the existing navigation.
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Gather alternative label suggestions from users.
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Conduct a card sorting exercise to explore new grouping logic.
I expedited the survey to align with a presentation I was giving at our in-person Focus Week, ensuring high visibility across departments. With 62 responses and a 68% completion rate, we identified clear patterns in confusing labels and unintuitive groupings.
The similarity matrix report in Maze, showing the most common groupings of navigation items from a card sorting exercise.
Prototyping and validation
Based on survey insights, I facilitated a working session with Product Management to refine two navigation models:
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Workflow-based grouping (aligning with user tasks).
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Role-based grouping (segmenting by user type).
We created interactive prototypes and ran internal interviews with Customer Success, whose insights favored the workflow-based model. The project was then handed off to Product Management for customer validation via Maze, yielding 30 responses that overwhelmingly supported the workflow-based structure with minor label refinements.
The old navigation, which users had to drill-down in to find the Templates page, compared to the new workflow-base navigation, which auto-expands and uses more familiar terminology.
Results and key learnings
The new navigation was officially released in April 2024, with notable improvements:
✅ More intuitive user experience, reducing friction for customers.
✅ Easier Sales demos, thanks to streamlined workflows and fewer clicks.
✅ Strengthened user research culture, gaining buy-in from Sales, Customer Success, and Marketing.
On a personal level, this project was a turning point for content design advocacy within MessageGears. It reinforced the value of user research and ensured ongoing collaboration between Design and Product Management.
Today, our team prioritizes both internal and external testing, ensuring we’re building the right solutions for our users—not just what we assume they need.