Context

Background

trender.ai started as a social listening tool for marketers, organized as a feed of “channels.” When the company pivoted to sales intelligence, the core job changed: reps now needed to find, track, and act on specific prospects. The channel feed couldn’t support that. It was overcrowded, hard to scan, and built around content rather than people.

Business Goal

Part of a growth initiative: make the product deliver value faster for its new audience, sales teams.

My Role

I owned the redesign of the app’s home, the entry point to every core workflow, from problem framing through developer hand-off. I worked from usability testing findings and stakeholder industry knowledge, on a one-week design timeline.

Before (Dec 2023)

After (Jan 2024)

The Problem

❌ Don’t make me work to find what I need.

Users scrolled through long lists to find a single name. The structure was still built for the old product.

What wasn’t working:

1. No fast way to find a record. No search, so every lookup meant scrolling.

2. No bulk actions. Every record had to be handled one at a time.

3. Unpredictable order. New channels sometimes appeared out of sequence, so users couldn’t rely on where things would be.

What we heard from users:

“I love the concept but what do I do from here?”
“I can’t find the profile I just set up, on LinkedIn it says it went through.”

The first was a time-to-value problem. The second was a system-status problem. Both pointed to the same root cause: we were making users work for something the interface should have handed them.

👉 CONSIDER OUR CONTENT

Users need a fast route to find a name or company.

There are two types of “records” in trender.

1. Watches - monitored social feed (LinkedIn & Twitter)

2. Profiles - AI insights, social & web, AI icebreakers for outreach.

Both lived in separate menus, so users had to know which type they were looking for before they could find it.

The opportunity: bring both record types into one place, searchable together.

Competitive research
I gained design inspiration from Outreach and HubSpot, the two sales tech tools most popular with our user base. (The cleanest and most modern tables I could find.)

Our users already spent their day in these tools. Matching that table-based pattern meant there was nothing new to learn.

✅ IN with the new!

Usability and speed updates. Sales reps can now find a prospect in seconds.

After: every prospect in one searchable table.

CRM Style for the win!

🙌 Redesign Result:

50% faster time-to-value

In usability sessions, users reached a finished profile’s insights in half the time. New profiles appeared at the top of the table, and any record was one search away.

The CRM-like format brought names and companies into one place, giving users clear organization and discoverability.

full control = Better usability

The details that make it fast

MY Process:

From sketch to hand-off in 1 week

Three choices made the timeline possible: sketch first, reuse the design system, and get the design in front of my PM early.

1. Quick sketches to organize the content helped me decide on column headers and oder before opening Figma.

2. Then I built in Figma quickly, using our table component from the design system.

3. I got the beginning design in front of my PM ASAP. During our call, she pulled up HubSpot and showed me pre-formatted tab views to add to the requirements.

4. I created a high-fidelity handoff comp in Figma, got approvals, and rapidly designed the rest of the screens, adding interaction design notes to each section so engineering could build without guessing.

See changes in red on the first shot.

1. Changed the “New Activity” column to “Status.” It now shows new activity, plus processing or queued info, so users can see where every record stands.

2. Added queue icons so users can see status at a glance.

3. Removed old nav links for Profile and Watch channels, so there’s one clear path to every record.

In Reflection

1. Why reinvent the wheel? Almost every sales app uses a table structure to manage data records. This structure and IA are a strong force and not something we should innovate on. The innovation belonged in the data, not the container.

2. Faster sounds simple, but it isn’t. Speed came from removing steps; one table, one search, and one place to check status.

Next Steps

With an increasing learning curve, in-app resources are key!

As trender grew into a sales intelligence platform, new users still asked, “What do I do from here?” I designed an in-app Resources & Tips page to help new users get started faster and help current users become experts.