The problem
The Customer Success Center began as a documentation portal, but over time it grew into a comprehensive customer platform supporting product documentation, learning, Professional Services, customer programs, release information, and community resources.
Each addition supported an important business objective, from improving product adoption to expanding customer engagement, but the experience evolved incrementally. Navigation, visual language, and content organization no longer reflected the breadth of the platform, making it increasingly difficult for customers to understand what was available or where to begin.
The Customer Success Center needed to evolve from a collection of customer resources into a unified platform that could support both current needs and future business initiatives.
Without a shared information architecture or design system, every new initiative introduced additional complexity and design drift. My challenge was to create a more cohesive experience that improved navigation while establishing a foundation that could continue evolving alongside the platform.
Project constraints
- Lead UX designer responsible for the Customer Success Center
- Supported customers across more than 15 enterprise products
- Existing CMS and engineering constraints
- Needed to improve the experience without disrupting active customer workflows
- Design system had to support future products, services, and customer programs
Before
Original homepage before redesign. Scroll to explore ↓
After
Redesigned homepage with the new illustration system. Scroll to explore ↓
Understanding how customers navigated the CSC
Before exploring solutions, I conducted a customer survey to understand how people used the Customer Success Center, what they struggled to find, and where the experience fell short. Thirty customers identified three recurring challenges: finding information unless they already knew the exact terminology, navigating and searching by product, and scanning dense, inconsistent page layouts.
These findings showed that the challenge extended beyond visual consistency. Customers needed clearer pathways through the CSC, stronger orientation within the broader Planview platform, and interfaces that helped them quickly understand where to go next.
I paired these findings with a UX audit of the existing experience, documenting navigation patterns, component usage, and inconsistencies across the platform. I also used Claude to organize audit findings, synthesize recurring themes, and explore alternative information architectures before validating recommendations through research and stakeholder conversations.
Across the research, a clear direction emerged: customers didn’t think in terms of Planview’s internal teams or content ownership. They thought in terms of goals, products, and the tasks they were trying to accomplish. The redesign needed to reflect those mental models while creating a structure that could continue evolving as the platform expanded.
Research synthesis connecting customer feedback to the key experience challenges that shaped the redesign.
Design principles
Design around customer goals
Organize the experience according to what customers were trying to accomplish, not how Planview organized its teams.
Build for growth
Create reusable patterns that could accommodate future products, services, and customer initiatives without introducing new complexity.
Reduce cognitive load
Make navigation, layouts, and interactions predictable so customers could focus on their goals rather than learning the interface.
Creating a cohesive design foundation
Creating a design system wasn’t simply about visual consistency. As the Customer Success Center expanded, every new initiative introduced additional layouts, interaction patterns, and visual styles. Without shared foundations, the platform became increasingly difficult to maintain, and every new experience risked adding more complexity for customers.
I established a shared design foundation of reusable components, design tokens, typography, and documentation that enabled new customer experiences to be added without reinventing the interface each time. Together, these patterns established predictable interactions across the CSC while giving future projects a foundation to build upon rather than reinvent.
Using Figma variables, I aligned the system with Planview’s existing product design language while introducing semantic color roles and standardized patterns tailored to customer-facing experiences.
Throughout the project, I used Claude and Figma AI to rapidly prototype new components, explore alternative layouts, and iterate on page concepts before refining them into production-ready designs. This allowed me to evaluate more design directions early while spending more time validating decisions with stakeholders and ensuring solutions fit customer needs, business goals, and the platform’s technical constraints.
Design system library. Swipe or use the arrows to browse.
The CSC also needed a visual identity of its own. I directed a graphic designer to move the platform away from the stock photography inherited from the marketing site toward a custom illustration system. I defined the visual direction and use cases, then worked with the designer through multiple rounds of iteration. The resulting illustration system gave the CSC a distinct visual identity while helping customers recognize they were still within a unified experience regardless of which section of the platform they visited.
