Reimagining a Hightouch for Marketers
Redesigning Hightouch for marketers while maintaining the power data teams expect.
Overview
Hightouch enables marketers to activate customer data across their entire growth stack. As the product scaled rapidly, the interface no longer reflected the sophistication of the platform — or the needs of its expanding audience.
Within five months of joining, I led a full redesign of the Hightouch platform, aligning highly opinionated stakeholders around a clear direction and shipping a modern, scalable product experience.
Results
Increased user satisfaction following launch
Improved Gartner rating scores post-redesign
A durable UI foundation now used across the product
Leadership challenge
Within a short onboarding window, I was responsible for:
Establishing a clear design direction in a highly opinionated environment
Redesigning a live, complex product without disrupting momentum
Shipping a cohesive experience while the platform continued to evolve
This required decisiveness, strong alignment, and a focus on outcomes over process.
My role
I owned the redesign from vision through production:
Defined the visual and interaction direction for the platform
Aligned leadership, product, and engineering on a single direction early
Rebuilt foundational systems (color, typography, iconography)
Restructured core layouts and interaction patterns across workflows
Prototyped the future state to validate direction before implementation
Partnered closely with engineering and contributed to production UI
The process
Conducted competitive analysis to map where Hightouch sat relative to modern SaaS tools and direct competitors
Facilitated moodboarding and brainstorming sessions with the design team to explore visual directions
Gathered micro-feedback through async Slack polls to pressure-test ideas without slowing momentum
Built an interactive Framer prototype showcasing three distinct style directions
Presented to a working group of key stakeholders to align 20+ opinions into a single design mandate
Explorations
Exploring wide
With a stronger definition of direction for this redesign and leadership's feedback, I explored numerous iterations of how the product could evolve, ultimately blending and mixing elements of each style story and converging into a single direction.
Prototyping & Alignment
Once the foundational systems were defined, I built a working prototype in Framer to validate the experience, gather feedback, and build internal conviction before committing to code.
Numerous explorations based off of style alignment from leadership.
High-fidelity prototype used to align leadership and de-risk the direction before production.
The work
The redesign was guided by a small set of principles:
Clarity over cleverness
Powerful tools should feel obvious, not impressive.Design for scale, not screenshots
Every decision needed to hold up across dozens of workflows.Respect power users while welcoming new ones
Evolution without alienation.Move fast with conviction
Alignment beats perfection when momentum matters.
This was a holistic rethink of the product experience — not incremental polish. The center content window acts almost as a sheet of paper—letting navigation fade to the background—a significant departure from the previous design.
The updated system established a confident visual language that could scale with the product.
Core surfaces were simplified to make advanced functionality feel more approachable without removing power.
Small interaction improvements compounded into meaningful usability gains across the platform.
A marketing-focused landing page catered to audience generation and syncing
Reducing emphasis on the navigation and introducing stronger hierarchy in the tables put the content first.
All new charts with thoughtfully curated data-viz palette and contextual loading skeletons
Results & Impact
Increased customer satisfaction post-launch
Improved Gartner ratings reflecting stronger market perception
Faster iteration enabled by a cohesive design foundation
Greater internal confidence in design as a strategic partner
The product now feels aligned with the sophistication of what Hightouch actually delivers.
Reflection
Clear principles accelerate alignment more than exhaustive process
Prototyping early creates confidence, not just validation
Large-scale change requires decisiveness, not consensus
Credits
Role: Lead Designer (staff product designer)
Tools: Figma, Framer, Cursor, Vercel, GitHub
Collaborators: Head of design, two supporting engineers, and direct collaboration with co-founders and CTO