WaveReview is the Mailchimp of product reviews. It helps its customers handle and get more reviews from their clients in social review sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor and Amazon (customers can create automated emails, quickly reply to negative reviews and amplify the reach of positive ones).

At the time I weighted in, they were concerned because they were losing customers by the month and they didn't know exactly why.

So I performed a UX audit to pin-point specific problems with their UI and observed users behavior using an online recording tool, to diagnose if something was up with their UI and learn what was happening.

The UX audit showed important disconnections between elements, mainly in the Dashboard (which was the most visited page) as it had few relevant elements for users, and in the (former) Groups section (now called Automations) because it was difficult to use and learn. 

Also, the on-boarding process did not follow the principle of progressive disclosure and metrics showed it was responsible for preventing many users from turning into customers.

Most importantly, we learned that WaveReview customers did see value in WaveReview, but they had trouble getting through simple tasks on the interface.

That's why we introduced a new on boarding process to help new clients get acquainted with the UI and learn how to use it so they could make the most out of it, and aimed to simplify the navigation and design of some sections like automation, comments and dashboard.

The end result was a relevant on-boarding process, a familiar navigation and a more usable UI.

When the UX audit was completed we had to implement changes in a short time frame, so we scored each section on 3 dimensions (severity of usability issues, number of visits and how close was each feature to the core business of WaveReview) and decided to work on higher scored sections first:

One of the most challenging features to redesign was the Groups section, because it did not have clear labels and it comprised many elements into the same space.

The following grid shows a quick sketch I drew to help us make sense of the Groups section. It allowed us to come up with a different arrangement of categories and names plus simpler interactions for the new Automations section:

The wireframe below guided our UI designer to design a screen for creating a clients Group and assign an Automation to it:

After the redesign was implemented we kept observing and tracking users behavior by using click, scroll, movement maps and behavioral metrics like visit time, clicks, views.

We realized that our redesign had successfully increased conversions of new users into customers, but the site still attracted too few visitors and needed to focus on marketing and advertising to raise up their visitors volume and absolute conversions value.