B2B SaaSDesign systemCloudEnterprise

CloudIQ Console Redesign

Two years embedded with a cloud-ops platform team, untangling a sprawling B2B console into a coherent, role-based experience.

✦ Client

CloudIQ Technologies

✦ Role

UX Developer → Web Designer

✦ Duration

2 years 5 months

✦ Platform

Web app · Internal tools · Customer-facing console

✦ The shape of it

Over two and a half years at CloudIQ I helped evolve the customer console from a tools-sheet of disconnected pages into a coherent product with a real design system, role-based navigation, and dashboards that customers stopped exporting to Excel.

Problem

The console had grown organically — every new feature added a sidebar entry, every customer ask added a settings page. Power users had memorized which screens to ignore; new users churned. The engineering team didn't have a single source of truth for components, so the same button existed in seven shades of blue.

What I did

A multi-quarter program: foundational research, a design system built in lockstep with the React codebase, a navigation overhaul that reorganized around roles instead of features, and dashboard templates that replaced a long tail of ad-hoc reports.

✦ Outcomes

What changed.

−38%

average time-to-first-meaningful-action for new users

Storybook-documented components retired and replaced

+24 NPS

lift among admin-role customers post-launch

internal teams adopted the design system

Process

The long
version.

01 — Where we started

I joined as a UX Developer with a brief that was equal parts design and front-end. The first month I shadowed the customer success team, sat in on five support calls a week, and built a tag cloud of the most common phrases in the support inbox. The runaway winner: 'where do I find…'.

From there it was clear the issue wasn't any individual screen — it was the lack of a mental model for the product as a whole. Different customer personas (admin, ops engineer, exec viewer) all saw the same flat menu, even though they used wildly different parts of the product.

02 — Foundations

Before I redesigned anything, I built the design system the team didn't realize they needed. Working with two engineers, I documented every button, input, and card actually shipping in production, then collapsed the duplicates into a 60-component Storybook library. I wrote the rules: spacing on a 4-pt grid, two type ramps, a single accent color per persona.

This was unglamorous work and the most important thing I did at CloudIQ. Once components had names, we could have real conversations about what changed and why.

03 — Navigation overhaul

Card sorts with 14 customers told us the existing IA matched our org chart, not their job. We rebuilt navigation around three role-based home screens, with a global command palette for everything else. The riskiest decision — burying half the existing menu items in the palette — tested cleanly because the people who needed those items already knew their names.

14 customer card-sorting sessions across three personas
3 role-based home screens replacing one shared menu
Cmd-K command palette for power-user actions
Phased rollout with a 'classic mode' fallback for two release cycles

04 — Dashboards that stick

The biggest visible win for customers was the dashboard rewrite. I designed a templated dashboard system with five starter templates per persona, drag-to-reorder cards, and saved views per team. We measured success not by usage of the dashboard itself, but by the drop in CSV exports — a proxy for 'I gave up and built it in Excel.' Exports dropped 47% in the first quarter.

05 — Working with engineering

Because I was sitting on the engineering side too, design changes shipped with code, not as PDFs. I ran a weekly half-hour 'design office hour' where any engineer could bring a screen and walk through component decisions. After two quarters, engineers were opening design system PRs themselves — the system stopped being mine.

06 — What I'd do differently

I waited too long to involve the customer success team in design reviews. They were the ones absorbing every confused user, and once I started inviting them to crit they pushed the work in better directions. Next time I'm embedding support voices from sprint zero.

✦ Keep going