Showcase
- Client
- Modo
- My role
- Product Owner, Manager & Design Lead
- Timeline
- 2022
- Skills applied
- Product Management · Design Systems & Mockups · User Testing · Content Strategy · Contractor Oversight · JSON · Contentful
The overview
Showcase is an interactive gallery of pre-built application screens built to inspire users and show them what is possible. In 2021, I took ownership of the tool as Product Owner and Lead Designer to revamp it from the ground up. My goal was simple: make it genuinely valuable for our customers and turn it into something our internal teams loved using.
I owned the whole lifecycle, balancing roadmap planning and contractor management with hands-on UI/UX design and execution.
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Research & discovery
Before diving into pixels, I needed to figure out why a tool with so much potential was sitting neglected with zero traffic. I ran a multi-week research sprint to get to the bottom of it, which included customer interviews, stakeholder chats, and auditing competing design inspiration tools.
What was breaking the experience
- Navigation frustration. Users were trapped in a constant loop of hitting the browser's back button just to explore different screens.
- No clear publishing pipeline. Content updates were rare because there was no straightforward system to add new designs.
- Inspiration without execution. Customers loved seeing the designs, but had no idea how to actually build them in their own projects.
- Search was a dead end. Finding specific examples or niche use cases felt almost impossible.
- Outdated UI. The overall look and feel felt tired, which undercut trust in the product.
Design & execution
Ideation → Sketching → Lo-fi & hi-fi mockups → JSON specs → QA → User acceptance testing → Feedback loops
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I wanted the revamped experience to feel fluid, intuitive, and genuinely helpful. Beyond giving the UI a modern polish, I focused on adding features that solved real workflows:
- Smart filtering & search. Filters by use case, feature set, and template type, alongside a search bar that queries backend tags for quick pinpointing.
- Direct template downloads. Instead of forcing users to recreate screens from scratch, we made templates downloadable so they could drop them straight into their workspace and start customizing.
- Connected ecosystem. Integrated direct links to training videos, documentation, and support tickets right where users needed them, turning dead ends into learning opportunities.
- Eliminating dead ends. Introduced a "View more similar examples" recommendation row at the bottom of each detail screen based on asset tags.
- Scalable content architecture. Shifted us to a headless CMS (Contentful), setting up a scalable system that made uploading and managing content easy for anyone on the team.
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Delivery & impact
The redesign breathed new life into the platform. Interest spiked so much that we ended up tailoring two distinct experiences to support different user journeys:
- Logged-in users — customers and internal teams. Full, unrestricted access to explore and download the complete template library.
- Prospects — sales and engineering. A curated view designed for live demos to highlight what our platform can do.
The results
- 45%jump in user engagement in the first month post-launch
- #2most valuable customer tool, right behind our core Training Tool
- 3 teamsexpanded usage into Sales and Go-Live workflows, far beyond its original home in Customer Success
- Multi-deptan active collaboration space with Marketing, Sales, and Support
Reflections
Navigating challenges
Managing this platform alongside my other responsibilities was a serious balancing act. To keep content fresh without burning out, I started turning high-performing customer designs into featured gallery templates. This solved our bandwidth issue and created a great community show-and-tell moment for our higher-ed users.
When scope growth threatened our engineering budget, I pitched the tool's potential to leaders in Marketing, Sales, and Support. Demonstrating how a better Showcase helped their goals helped me secure cross-departmental buy-in and shared resources to bring the vision to life.
What I took away
Good design builds cross-functional bridges. When budget or headcount is light, showing other teams how thoughtful UX solves their problems is the best way to gain champions and resources.
Design ownership means looking past the canvas. Balancing product strategy, contractor management, and actual UX design reinforced that the best products come from caring as much about the system behind the scenes as the pixels on the screen.
