Overview
CSG Ignite is a revenue management and billing platform used by 900+ enterprise customers in the telecom, utilities, and media sectors. When I joined the project, the platform had grown through acquisition — 7 separate products stitched together with inconsistent UX patterns, a fractured information architecture, and an onboarding experience that took new users 3–6 weeks to navigate independently.
My scope covered the core workflow redesign, IA restructuring, and design system unification across 3 cross-functional teams.
The Problem
The platform suffered from accretion complexity — each acquired product had been bolted on rather than integrated. The result was a product that experienced users had learned to navigate through muscle memory, but new users found nearly impenetrable.
Symptoms:
- New user time-to-productivity: 3–6 weeks
- Support ticket volume: 1,200+ per month, 40% of which were navigation-related
- 14 different ways to perform the same core action across different modules
- No unified navigation — each module had its own nav structure and terminology
Business impact: Customer churn in the first 90 days was running at 18%, almost entirely attributed to UX complexity.
Research
Diary Studies
Recruited 8 new users across 3 customer organizations to complete diary studies over their first 4 weeks. Participants recorded confusion points, workarounds, and moments of success. This generated 340+ qualitative data points that mapped directly to specific UI failures.
Card Sorting
Ran open card sorts with 24 current users across Tier 1 and Tier 2 support levels to understand their mental model of the platform's structure. Results revealed 6 distinct grouping models — the system reflected none of them.
Heuristic Audit
Conducted a full heuristic evaluation against Nielsen's 10 principles + 4 domain-specific enterprise UX heuristics I developed. Identified 87 distinct violations, prioritized by frequency and severity.
Information Architecture Redesign
The original IA had 3 top-level sections, 14 sub-sections, and 6 cross-cutting "shortcut" menus that duplicated content without making it clearer.
New IA principles:
- One canonical home per concept. Every feature lives in exactly one place.
- Progressive disclosure over feature density. Show the right depth at the right moment.
- Terminology from users, not engineers. Replace system-centric labels with task-centric language.
The new IA reduced top-level nav to 5 items, sub-navigation to 8, and eliminated all "shortcut" menus in favor of contextual smart actions.
Design Process
Wireframe Sprints
Ran weekly design sprints with cross-functional stakeholders. Each sprint focused on one workflow: billing cycle management, dispute resolution, contract amendments, reporting, and system administration.
Used low-fidelity wireframes to validate IA decisions before any visual design. This kept feedback focused on structure, not aesthetics.
Design System Consolidation
The 7 acquired products used 7 different component libraries. I led the consolidation into a single shared system with:
- 42 base components with documented behavior states
- 3 theme variants (standard, high-contrast, print)
- Design token architecture supporting customer-configurable branding
- Storybook documentation used directly by engineering
Multi-tenant Theming
Designed a token-based theming architecture that allowed enterprise customers to apply their brand colors without breaking component accessibility. Developed a contrast-checking tool embedded in the admin settings panel.
The Solution
Unified Navigation — A single persistent sidebar nav with consistent iconography, clear grouping, and breadcrumb trails for deeply nested workflows. Users can now find any feature in under 3 clicks.
Guided Onboarding — A contextual onboarding layer that activates for new accounts, surfacing tooltips, checklists, and "first success" moments tied to real workflow completion (e.g., "Your first billing cycle is ready to run").
Smart Action Panels — Context-sensitive action panels that surface the 3–5 most relevant actions for any given object, reducing the need to know where to navigate.
Impact
- 60% reduction in new user time-to-productivity (6 weeks → 2.4 weeks)
- 44% reduction in support ticket volume
- 52% improvement in key task completion rates
- +31 NPS points in the 6-month post-launch survey
- 90-day churn reduced from 18% to 7%
Learnings
1. IA is the foundation, not the finish. Every visual design decision we made downstream was either supported or undermined by the IA work. Getting the structure right early was the highest-leverage thing I did on this project.
2. Design systems are products. The component library only succeeded because we treated it as a product with a roadmap, documentation, and adoption metrics — not a side project.
3. Onboarding is a trust contract. The new onboarding experience worked because it made a promise ("we'll get you to your first successful billing cycle") and delivered on it. Generic feature tours don't build confidence.