Gliffy Website

Director of UX, 2012-2016 • View Live Site

Gliffy is a diagramming tool that initially launched in 2005 and I started working with them in 2012 to redesign their app. After we launched the new version of the app in 2013, I began to look at the website.

My challenge at the time was to convince the team to revisit the company's brand so that it would align with the design of the app. However, because my initial focus was around consistency, common usability heuristics and clear messaging (and I knew very little about analytics, SEO, or A/B testing at the time), getting a new website design approved was initially not an easy sell.

Over the years though, I learned about setting clear and measurable goals, testing (via Optimizely), and designing for business impact as well as user happiness. Our website went through many, many, iterations and I owe a great deal to the other talented designers I hired to help (Andrew Lee and Teresa Tan).

Gliffy Home 2015

The last experiment I worked on in 2016 involved testing ideas to increase signups for our SAAS app. Our existing home page above was designed with the two-pronged goal of getting more people to try our SAAS product without reducing traffic to our Confluence plugin (our main source of revenue).

After a year, the executive team made a decision to focus more on our SAAS app so we changed our goal to increase sign ups on our home page. I redesigned the page with a single call to action and sign up form to reduce the friction for signing up. This had the happy effect of increasing our sign up rate by 83%.

Gliffy Home 2016