Project Overview
Orbit Technologies had spent two years building a project management platform with a genuinely impressive feature set. Under the hood, the product could do things that most competitors in the space could not — advanced dependency mapping, cross-team resource allocation, real-time workload visualization, and a reporting engine that gave managers a level of operational clarity that was rare in the market. The engineering team had built something worth being proud of.
The problem was that none of that power was accessible to the average user. The interface had been designed by engineers who understood the product deeply and unconsciously assumed that users would too. The result was an experience that rewarded patience and technical confidence — and punished everyone else. Onboarding completion rates were sitting well below industry benchmarks, average session lengths were declining quarter over quarter, and churn in the first thirty days was significantly higher than it had any right to be for a product this capable.
Our company was engaged to diagnose the problem precisely and redesign the core user experience from the ground up — with a particular focus on onboarding, the primary dashboard, and the most frequently used workflow paths. The goal was clear: make Orbit's power accessible to the people it was built for, without removing a single feature or compromising the sophistication that made the product genuinely valuable to its most engaged users.
The Challenge
The central tension in this project was one that comes up frequently in complex product redesigns: how do you simplify the experience for new and casual users without alienating the power users who have built their entire workflow around the existing interface? Make it too simple and you risk frustrating the people who are already getting real value from the product. Keep it too complex and you continue losing users before they ever discover that value.
Our company also faced the challenge of working within a defined eight-week timeline for a redesign scope that could easily have consumed twice that time. Prioritization and discipline were non-negotiable from the very first day of the engagement.
What We Delivered
Our company delivered a complete redesign of the Orbit onboarding experience, primary dashboard, core task management workflow, and notification system — all in the form of fully annotated, development-ready design files built in a structured component library that Orbit's engineering team could implement directly. Every interaction state, every empty state, every error state, and every responsive breakpoint was fully designed and documented.
We also delivered a revised design system — an organized, scalable component library that gave Orbit's internal design team a foundation they could build on independently going forward, rather than inheriting the inconsistent patchwork of one-off components that had characterized the previous interface.
A full usability testing report was included in our deliverables, documenting the findings from three rounds of prototype testing conducted with real users during the design process — including specific quotes, behavioral observations.
The Outcome
The redesigned Orbit platform launched at the end of week eight, on schedule and with zero critical issues in the initial release. The results in the first month post-launch were significant across every metric the engagement had been designed to move. Onboarding completion rates increased by 40% compared to the pre-redesign baseline. Average session length grew by over 25%. Support ticket volume related to navigation and "how do I find" questions dropped by more than half. And thirty-day retention — the metric Orbit's leadership cared about most — improved by 22 percentage points compared to the same period in the previous quarter.
The Orbit team described the engagement as one of the most valuable investments they had made since founding the company — not just for the numbers, but for the shift in how their entire organization thought about the relationship between product experience.
"AI agents helped us automate repetitive work, improve response times, and give our team more time to focus on strategic initiatives."
Ethan Brooks
Head of Operations, NovaFlow
