Starting With Clarity, Not Pixels
Before anything went into Figma, I needed to understand what the product was actually supposed to do — not what it had been coded to do. I sat with the VP and product owner across multiple sessions to understand the vision and problem statement behind the redesigning.
All it structured with the audit of the existing app. I reframed the project's intent into HMW questions — How might we help a manager instantly see which asset is bleeding the most in repair costs? These weren't just UX practice that took place but they became the filter every design decision passed through.
ChatGPT and Figma Make were used to quickly generate initial layouts and flows, creating a functional proof of concept. This AI-driven prototype helped align the team early on the direction we were going to take into Figma for detailed design.
role
Lead UX Designer
timeframe
3 months
collaborators
2 designers, VP and Product owner
worked on
Tab & Mobile App (Android) · Web App for Admins
key challenge among many
As design progressed, it became clear the challenge wasn't just visual. There were two real tensions pulling in different directions:
The dev team was open to rebuilding the UI, but required layouts to follow Android’s canonical patterns to support a single codebase across mobile and tablet. This introduced a key constraint—while these patterns ensure consistency, they don’t always align with device-specific user needs. Since our users skewed toward tablets, strictly adhering to canonical views limited flexibility and often shifted design decisions toward engineering constraints over user experience.
Tight Agile timelines added further pressure. The design team was not used to building from scratch and had primarily worked within predefined systems. This made maintaining quality challenging—review cycles were often spent fixing basic issues like inconsistent components and spacing, rather than focusing on meaningful UX validation.
solution
I designed three layout directions — not stylistic variations, but three structural bets. -> Option 1 was purely user-led: every pain point addressed, navigation optimised for the manager's mental model. -> Option 2 adjusted information hierarchy based on internal design review feedback — tightening the paths to key screens. -> Option 3 came after a conversation with the R&D head: layouts built around Android canonical behaviour, rail navigation instead of bottom tabs, adaptive panels that handled phone and tablet from a single codebase. As the lead, under the Agile framework I owned the end-to-end deliverables—established the design system, defined the app’s user flow from MVP designs in AI to final visual theme, and divided the use cases among the team and guided to build on it.
All new experience introduced in Workpulse
95% use cases were covered on first dev handoff • 0 to 1 full component library built in a week
After multiple review cycles, Option 2 was finalized—shaped through continuous discussions, iterations, and team alignment. It turned into a win across the product team.
The new theme brought a fresh, consistent direction to Workpulse and was well received, eventually setting the foundation to revamp other apps as well. Along the way, the team also adapted to a more lean UX approach, improving how we collaborated and delivered.
