Home: from a crowded lobby to a clear starting point
I took over a stalled Home screen redesign ahead of SafetyCulture's biggest launch, reset it to first principles, and shipped on deadline with meaningful interactions up 27%.
Impact at a glance
+27% meaningful interactions on Home, measured daily and weekly [add baseline and result]
Bounce rate down from 58% to about 42%, after I traced the cause to SEO rather than UX and we fixed it
DAU up about 2%, ahead of target
Shipped on deadline (July to October 2023) for the company's biggest launch
A modular Home now in build, picking up what we deliberately left out for time
The situation and the problem
I inherited the Home screen redesign on day one, already in flight. The business was gearing up for the biggest launch in its history, "SafetyCulture 2.0". The project had no clear direction and no well-defined customer insight behind it.
For the business: leadership wanted a "refresh" for launch. That's a look, not a goal.
For customers: The platform has a steep learning curve for new users. 70% of users left Home without a meaningful interaction. Bounce rate was 58%.
The brief on the table was a single line from a senior stakeholder: "80% of customers should be able to complete 80% of tasks right in the home page."
The turning point: three meetings, three different Homes
When I looked at the work so far, each design review had produced a whole new Home, shaped by whichever stakeholder the designer had met most recently. It wasn't iterating toward something customers would value. It was Conway's law in action: every team wanted a prime spot on Home for their feature.
Same project, three unrelated Homes.
I stepped in late and took the project back to first principles. I didn't want to take the work off the designer, so I gave support at two levels:
Air support: getting leadership to simplify the direction.
Ground support: working alongside the designer on assumption mapping, quantitative data, and customer interviews.
The team ran about 15 customer interviews, and I ran around 5 of them myself.
Challenging the brief
"80% of customers should be able to complete 80% of tasks right in the home page" (Anonymous senior stakeholder)
Reframed: "80% of customers should be able to complete 80% of tasks right in the lobby"
I tracked the "80% of tasks" line to a post-it on a FigJam board. It had come from the Head of Design, and the CEO had been in the room and agreed. Nobody had challenged it since, so it had become the plan.
Challenging it as the new person was uncomfortable. I did it with a clear argument, not an opinion:
The goal was wrong. A Home screen isn't where work gets done. It exists to tell new users what this system does and that it can solve their problem, to guide them to value quickly, and to get out of the way of experienced users.
I reframed it from a workspace to a lobby: orient people and send them where they need to go.
My role
I was the design lead on this, working through other people as much as directly:
Set the design vision from first principles: what must Home do, what are the key jobs to be done, and what are the customers who do interact doing?
Ran customer interviews and pulled the quantitative data.
Influenced the CPO and Head of Design on direction, and built alignment with Product, Engineering, Marketing and Go-to-Market leadership.
Coached one product designer and critiqued the detailed UI and UX solutions.
Key decisions
1. Reframe the goal. Home orients and routes. It isn't where the work happens. This ended the contest for space on the page.
2. Build around the Agenda. The data and interviews showed what customers who do interact with Home actually use, so I made a data-backed case to focus on it instead of giving every feature a slot.
3. Solve in slices, and accept trade-offs. With a fixed launch date, we worked through a list of specific issues in priority order and left some for later on purpose.
The solution
We started from a list of the problems in the existing Home and tracked each one to the end. Nine of the twelve were solved for launch. The other three were partly solved, and we accepted that because of time.
Solved (9): Home wasn't signified as Home; Quick links; Search that didn't do what it implied; Stacked cards and lists, and what was clickable; Filtering; Metadata; "In progress" was confusing; "In progress" behaved differently in different places; An oversized hero.
Partly solved (3): Gradient; Resizable, modular sections; Snowflake components.
The modular Home we deferred is now being built.
Results
Meaningful interactions on Home: Before [baseline]. After: up 27%.
Bounce rate: Before 58%. After: about 42%.
Daily active users: Before: target set pre-launch. After: up about 2%, ahead of target.
Delivery: Before: launch date fixed. After: shipped on deadline, October 2023.
What the numbers mean
Bounce rate: it wasn't a UX problem. Much of our traffic came from the US, from people who took us for a CMS competitor to HubSpot, and they left at once. Fixing the SEO brought bounce down. The problem had been hidden until we looked into it, and I want to be clear the improvement came from that fix, not from the redesign.
Meaningful interaction: we defined it as interacting with the central content of the page, not the left or top navigation. I challenged that, because navigation is meaningful for most people. The 27% is on the stricter measure, so I'd treat it as a floor.
Beyond the metrics: I built trust with the design team and my network across the business, and the Home direction left a clear foundation for the modular version.
What I learned
Ask the obvious questions. The most expensive assumption on this project was one nobody had questioned. Trace a direction back to where it came from.
Metrics lie. A high bounce rate looked like a design problem and turned out to be an SEO problem. Understand what a number measures before you design against it.
Network first, and fast. Alignment with Go-to-Market and leadership mattered as much as the design work.
Don't jump in. Create space for designers to grow. I stepped in late and I'd do it earlier next time, but as support for the designer, not a takeover. [What would you do differently? Add one concrete thing here.]
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