From Frustrating to Frictionless: Helping a global innovation agency to improve insight quality
Client
Innovation Consultancy
Engagement
MVP Definition Sprint
Duration
4 weeks
A UK-based innovation consultancy had spent the better part of a year developing an AI-powered research and insights platform — a tool designed to give their clients a faster, smarter way to gather and analyse consumer research. The concept was strong. But as AI began reshaping the consulting industry, the pressure to accelerate became urgent.
The product existed, but it wasn't ready. The mobile app — the consumer-facing interface used to capture participant responses to research questions — had been built entirely by developers without any design input. The result was a technically functional but commercially unlaunchable product:
- No brand identity or visual consistency — the app looked unfinished and inspired little confidence in research participants.
- No design system or component library — every screen had been built in isolation, making development slow and future scaling costly.
- Poor wayfinding and error handling — users were getting lost within the app, unable to recover from mistakes or understand where they were in a research session.
- Unreliable system status feedback — critically, participants were losing recorded video responses because the app gave no clear indication that uploads were still in progress, causing them to exit before submission completed.
With a major client evaluating the platform, the consultancy needed to move from rough prototype to launch-ready product — fast.
THe Approach
Working directly with the CEO, CTO, and lead developer, we led Phase 1 of the platform's strategy and redesign through a focused MVP Definition Sprint over 4 weeks. The goal was not just to improve the interface — it was to define the strategic vision for the product and create the foundation for scalable, fast-moving development going forward.
THe solution
The sprint delivered a launch-ready consumer app and a scalable design system — giving the consultancy both an immediately deployable product and the infrastructure to build quickly from that point forward.
But the goal was never just functional. In a market where AI research tools were multiplying fast — most of them visually interchangeable, template-driven, and forgettable — the product needed to feel like it belonged to this consultancy specifically. That meant a design that was considered, distinctive, and impossible to mistake for a white-label alternative.
Key design solutions included:
- A unified component library and design system — built not just for consistency and development speed, but as a deliberate expression of the consultancy's brand. Every visual decision, from typography to colour to spacing, was made to reinforce credibility and signal quality to research participants from the first screen.
- Redesigned navigation and wayfinding — users could now orient themselves clearly within the app, understand their progress through a research session, and recover from errors without losing their place. The experience felt considered rather than assembled.
- Robust system status and upload feedback — a redesigned progress and status layer ensured participants always knew when uploads were in progress, preventing the video response losses that had plagued the previous version.
- A custom multi-file screen recording submission flow — designed from the ground up to handle multiple screen-recorded video files in a single submission. No native mobile functionality existed to solve this. No off-the-shelf pattern came close. It required genuine design-led problem solving — and the result showed.
Taken together, the app didn't just work. It looked and felt like a product the consultancy had the right to charge for — one that stood apart from the derivative, generic tools beginning to crowd the space.
THe Outcome
The redesigned platform secured further investment backing — with the quality and clarity of the product serving as tangible evidence of the consultancy's ability to execute on its AI-powered vision.
More concretely, the initial enterprise customer committed to using the platform for the foreseeable future — a direct commercial validation of the product's readiness and the value of getting the user experience right before scaling.
The MVP Definition Sprint also established the design and development foundation that will allow the team to move significantly faster in subsequent phases — compressing future build cycles and reducing the cost of iteration.