The application could've threatened the company's plans for global expansion. So CTO Philippe Hammond and CEO Jules Paquette turned to ZURB to redesign the application's UI, kicking its performance and appearance up a notch.

Along the way, ZURB discovered that the sales promises created so many one-off engineering solutions that maintenance and scale were becoming issues that would bring any growth spurt to a grinding halt. Worse, we learned after interviewing customers directly that customer engagement was even lower than we previously thought because of the performance problems.

Too many options The old version of the website left users feeling overwhlemed about what they should do next.

That exploration led us to a wonderful discovery that not only would solve the interaction problems, but also better fulfill Borealis' mission of social and environmental responsibility and create a new opportunity to sell application "modules" in preset packages of mini-apps. Those mini-apps would be easier to build, maintain, and get customers stoked about.

Only by visualizing real world solutions through interface prototypes were we able to ferret out strategic opportunities capable of growing the business.

Had we not scrutinized, questioned, and worked directly on the applications' current and potential future interface, we'd never have hit upon those three benefits to Borealis and its customers. Only by visualizing real world solutions through interface prototypes were we able to ferret out strategic opportunities capable of growing the business.

"This can totally change the way we sell our products to our customers by giving us opportunities to resell additional modules once we have them!"

As we thought more and more about centering the app's interaction around the stakeholders, we sparked on the idea of a sidebar nav and a contextual upsell within each module. We'd hit upon an aha-moment for Jules.

"This can totally change the way we sell our products to our customers by giving us opportunities to resell additional modules once we have them!"

We even thought that a super-memorable user story would go a long way. During a high-energy work session, we had the company's CEO narrate a user story as we jotted it down This simple effort of egging him on and writing down this emotional story provided the glue for every decision we made afterward.

End-to-end redesign without putting down the pen

We laid out the whole application in detailed sketches, going through five iterations, sometimes re-exploring previous decisions. We went from very low fidelity to working out a lot of rich detail.

With paper prototypes, we didn't waste anytime getting our ideas out into the wild and in front of the same customers we interviewed before. Having something that customers could actually touch gave us the confidence that our improvements would work and helped shaped our decision-making as we moved on to hi-fi wireframes.

This app not only looked good, it was well-documented with an interactive style guide.

The team, however, was stuck deciding on a visual direction. It was deadly important that Borealis stand out from their competition, but it was also a struggle to deviate from what they had done before. So we explored various options and then focused their decisions on three areas of the app that were the root of their indecision: backgrounds, feeds, and default layouts.

In the end, this app not only looked good, it was well-documented with an interactive style guide. The style guide provided them with tools like a layout grid overlay and fully-coded reusable patterns for any page of the app. With these tools, Borealis was able to start building out the production app and planning for a possible new pricing structure.