Scope: Product Design + Design System
Timeline: 2020–2025, In house
My role: Senior Product designer: flows, UI, and the component library, across the whole period
A B2B credentialing platform. Five years of design, compressed into the four decisions that mattered.
The Problem
Organizations issue certificates and badges at scale — hundreds per course, thousands per year. Sertifier covered the full lifecycle, but its campaign creation flow was one long form. Users lost focus, left the page to complete subtasks elsewhere, and dropped out mid-campaign. Meanwhile the product itself had grown for years without a design system, so every new screen made the next one harder.
Constraints
A live product with paying customers — no pause-and-redesign budget.
Five years of accumulated screens designed at different times by different rules.
New features (Pathways, advanced analytics) shipping in parallel with the cleanup.
The Approach
Decision 1: break the campaign form into a step-by-step builder. The alternative was salvaging the single form with progressive disclosure and better grouping. Rejected, because the form's layout wasn't the core problem — the page-leaving was. Each step became its own page with one task, and the subtasks that used to eject users (recipient import, credential design, delivery emails) moved inside the builder. The step structure later absorbed new features, including AI-powered campaign creation, without redesign.
Decision 2: design Pathways as a node graph, not a list. Pathways turns scattered credentials into a structured learning journey. The obvious version was a list of prerequisites per credential. Rejected, because "and/or" automation logic across credential tiers is unreadable as a list and self-evident as a graph — credentials as nodes, tiers as columns, logic as connectors. Since no comparable pattern existed in the product, I planned it with wireflows before any UI existed.
Decision 3: a token-driven component library instead of a visual refresh. The interface looked dated, and a one-time restyle would have fixed that for about a year. Rejected in favor of a design system with tokens, so consistency became the default state rather than a recurring project. Building it was a standing task, not a sprint — new components and tokens were added as features demanded them.
The Range Moment
The analytics advanced-filter UI had to survive whatever the filter logic could produce — one tiny bubble, one enormous bubble, filters wrapping to a second line. Because the same person mapped the logic cases and drew the interface states, the ugly combinations were found and solved at the design stage, not filed as bugs afterward.
The Outcome
A customer reported 82% saved on operational time after moving credential issuance to the automated flow The design system has been in production since 2024; the 2019 sidebar is preserved in the case file for contrast, which is its only remaining function.
