Brandollo

Brandollo's beta had been built without a UX designer, and it showed. Activation was low, retention was lower, and investors and customers were both asking the same question: what is this for, and how do I use it? I redesigned the My Plans tab, Brandollo's highest-traffic surface, and built the design system that carried the company through its next two products.

Brandollo was a Melbourne SaaS startup helping small businesses, marketers, and founders plan and manage their marketing in one place. The beta had been built without a UX designer, and the result was an engineering-led product that confused users at every key task.

To grow, Brandollo needed a project management experience that matched modern SaaS expectations and supported a new business direction around scalable planning tools. The redesign had to lift usability, support a diverse user base, and give the team a flexible foundation for future product work.

I had three months and one engineering team. Doing everything was off the table, so I made deliberate calls about where design effort would create the most leverage.

• Prioritised the My Plans tab. It was the highest-traffic surface and the area with the worst usability scores. Fixing it would unblock activation across the entire product.
• Built a reusable component layout rather than one-off screens. With a lean team and a roadmap of new features after launch, an extensible system would pay back faster than polished individual screens.
• Tested in high fidelity. Brandollo's users had varying tech confidence and edge-case scenarios mattered. Low fidelity tests would have missed too much.
• Validated terminology with founders before testing. The Activity vs. Sub-Activity confusion was a foundational issue, not a UI issue. We renamed Plan, Activity, and Sub-task before any visual work landed.

Audit and competitive positioning

The platform audit surfaced confusing terminology, weak visual hierarchy, inconsistent colour use, unclear sidebar behaviour, and broken UI patterns. Competitive analysis across Husky, AHA, Workfront, Asana, ClickUp, and ActiveCollab revealed that while competitors had strong workflow tools, almost none integrated educational content. That gap became Brandollo's differentiator.

Visual design

The UI needed to feel familiar and low-friction for time-poor professionals across varying tech confidence levels. I applied a modular, card-based layout with soft contrast, clear hierarchy, and consistent iconography. Subtle blues and purples conveyed professionalism, with accent colour drawing the eye to primary actions like Create an Activity.

Learn labels and icons distinguished educational content from action items, reinforcing the differentiation identified in the competitive analysis. Collapsible sections reduced clutter for users managing many projects, and a responsive layout future-proofed the design for screen size variation and product growth.

Handover and impact

The high-fidelity prototype served as the development spec, the stakeholder alignment tool, and the testing artefact. A third iteration, based on usability findings, improved task success and reduced friction across the redesigned surfaces.

Beyond shipping the redesign, the work established the design system that scaled across the rest of Brandollo's product suite. The LMS, analytics dashboard, and workflow tools that followed all inherited the component library, interaction patterns, and design language defined in this project.

The redesigned project management feature became Brandollo's flagship surface. The design system I established carried across two additional B2C platforms that followed, including a white-label LMS and workflow tools.