Launchmetrics (LM) provides first-party analytics software to fashion, luxury, and beauty brands. Four weeks after joining, I found myself as the sole product designer leading the merger of our two flagship B2B SaaS products into one platform.
Since the tools had overlapping features but different data enrichment strategies, it was decided by stakeholders that Insights would be rolled into Discover to maintain a single source of truth and create a unified reporting platform.
Clients use Discover daily, but they often rely on LM consultants to build dashboards and extract data from Insights. Separate user roles became key to merging the two products.
"Clients prefer Discover over Insights because it's easier to use. They can browse the feed and quickly see their coverage."
Interviews with our Customer Success and Solution Consulting (CSM) teams revealed that consultants were frequently exporting data to Excel or Tableau to build custom graphs and tables for clients that were impossible to build in Insights’ existing report builder. To speed up their workflow, CSMs requested the ability to create custom dashboards, charts, and pivot tables that could be shared with and monitored by clients.
Prototyping with Balsamiq wireframes allowed us to supercharge our brainstorming sessions and quickly surface key issues.
Using the Double Diamond framework, we explored how to merge the two products and incorporate advanced dashboard features without overwhelming our everyday users. Drawing inspiration from my competitive analysis of tools like Metabase and Tableau, I created early Balsamiq flows to visualize how users could move from the existing Discover feed to a new Dashboards page, as well as how they could build advanced pivot tables and apply global, dashboard, and chart-level filters.
These prototypes revealed deeper architectural challenges around data storage, filtering hierarchies, and permissions that ultimately led us to revise the roadmap.
After aligning with stakeholders and developers, we defined three core features of the MVP: Create dashboards, add charts, and export reports.
Despite both products existing under the same Metrics umbrella, Discover and Insights had different UI patterns. I utilized and extended the official Launchmetrics design system to bridge this gap.
Interviews and Fullstory recordings revealed that users were confused by the UI discrepancies between the two products, particularly with the filter bar. In Insights, the filter bar did not persist across all dashboards; users had to reapply their filters when they landed on the Reports page, and it was unclear why some filters were available on one dashboard and not another.
To standardize the filter bars, I pushed for adoption of a single-row filter bar that already existed in our design system but had not yet been implemented.
Usability testing revealed that rolling Insights into Discover and keeping Discover’s existing navigation—to maintain product familiarity—might have been a mistake.
To test the fluidity of the navigation and adequately simulate global, dashboard, and chart-level filter conflicts, I fed Figma Make 30+ high-fidelity screens and components that I’d built using our design system to create a dynamic prototype for usability testing.
After walking through the flows with stakeholders and performing a pilot study, I received valuable feedback regarding the navigation. We'd been so caught up in the details of custom charting and multi-level filtering that we'd failed to notice a key issue: The filter bar only persists across the Feed and Dashboard pages, but the current navigational hierarchy implies that Newsletters and Charts are filtered as well.
Next steps: Rethinking the navigation and iterating on the MVP.
Due to timeline and budget constraints, the MVP must ship with the existing Discover navigation. However, as a quick fix, I’ve proposed using color to visually separate the Feed and Dashboard pages from Newsletter and Chart.
