Fuze

Visual Design Update

The problem

When I joined the company, Fuze was working on a relatively new build of their End-User facing Desktop application. It was fine, but in qualitative testing, users were very luke-warm. I also thought we could improve on both the UX and aesthetics of the product with a relatively low-impact project, so I started developing a proposal with the designers on the Desktop team.

Our goal was to modernize the look and feel, improve usability issues, and align better with the company’s brand.

The project

I worked with the Principal Designer for the Desktop product to develop several iterations on what we could do with the design. Our areas of focus were:

Lighten up the experience. The original design used a lot of dark purple, which made for a heavy, oppressive feel.
Keep purple as the key color. This was the company’s primary brand color in both marketing and across the products, and was a real differentiator for us. Even though it’s an unusual choice for Enterprise software, we wanted to double-down on it.
Improve the calls to action, and bring the phone experience to the foreground. The initial design was very “Chat-first”, but this didn’t align with the needs of the majority of our users, for whom the phone was the primary use case for the software.
Use small changes (spacing, typogrophy, color, etc) to improve the UX of the product whereever possible.

The results

The end result was a lot of small changes that added up to a very impactful redesign. The changes were well-received, both internally and with our users, who appreciated the new design qualitatively and had a better experience based on their usage data.

Note: While I was closely involved in directing and shaping the overall project and each individual design, I didn’t actually create them. They are all the work of the fantastic designer I was working with on my team.