Marketly's analytics dashboard was built by three different teams over two years, and it looked like it. I led the design system that brought it back together, plus a first-run onboarding flow that finally explained what the product actually did.
Marketly
UI Designer
14 weeks
Web · Desktop-first
2024
New users routinely churned within the first session, and the team's working theory was the product was 'too complex.' Looking closer, the complexity wasn't the problem — the inconsistency was. Three teams had built three different button styles, two different chart libraries, and two distinct navigation patterns, sometimes on the same page.
New users weren't confused by what Marketly did. They were confused by whether the screen they were looking at was even part of the same product.
I catalogued every component variant in the live product — 34 button styles alone — and worked with each team to agree on one version of each, documenting the reasoning so future debates had a reference point.
Rather than a from-scratch design system that engineering would need months to adopt, the new system was built as a layer on top of the existing CSS variables already in use — meaning teams could adopt it incrementally, component by component.
The new first-run flow drops users into a pre-populated demo workspace with their actual use case already configured, rather than an empty dashboard with a tooltip tour — so the first thing people see is the product working, not a list of features.
Adoption of the design system was gradual by design — six months after launch, 80% of screens used the new components, migrated incrementally as teams touched each area. The onboarding flow shipped sooner and had an immediate, measurable effect on activation.