Company Profile Redesign

An overview of the design decisions that improved how users explore company information, trade relationships, and market opportunities.

Duration

Mar-Apr, 2024

Product

Trademo

Role and Team

Me, PM , Dev

Services

#

Enterprise UX

#

B2B SaaS Design

Impact

Within 3 months of launch:

  • 15% → 58% section engagement.

  • 2.2× increase in average time on the section.

  • 32% more users went on to perform a downstream action.

  • Consistent positive feedback in customer conversations post-launch.

Users & their needs

Trade Overview isn't a general dashboard — it serves three distinct, high-intent groups, each arriving with a different job to be done. All three are decision-makers under time pressure, reading an unfamiliar company and needing to reach a judgment fast.

SOURCING & PROCUREMENT — "Can I rely on this supplier?"

  • Pain: Can't see a supplier's whole footprint at once — countries, shipping consistency, and ports are split across separate toggles.

  • Consequence: Slow supplier qualification and a fallback to spreadsheets and email, raising supply-chain risk.

  • Need: A single, confident read of a supplier's footprint to qualify or reject quickly.


SALES & BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT — "Is this company a prospect?"

  • Pain: Must piece together a company's trade behaviour — what it trades, where, and at what volume — before judging it.

  • Consequence: Slower, less accurate qualification, and fewer quality prospects added per session.

  • Need: Decision-driving signals surfaced up front so prospecting is fast and accurate.


RESEARCH & MARKET ANALYSTS — "How does this company actually behave?"

  • Pain: Can't move from a global view (countries) down to specifics (ports, routes, locations) without losing the thread.

  • Consequence: Broken investigations — the section becomes a dead end instead of an entry point into deeper analysis.

  • Need: A continuous path from global to granular, with depth available on demand.

The problem — a section full of data, empty of insight

Trade Overview was the most-visited yet least-used part of every company profile. A user vetting a potential supplier landed on the one screen that should tell them everything — and instead met four generic radio buttons, a flat map, and a thin scatter of numbers.

Why it failed each user:

  • Data was hidden behind toggles. Countries, ports, and locations lived in separate radio-button views, so no one ever saw the whole footprint at once.

  • The map was decorative, not functional. It took prime space but wasn't interactive or informative, so users ignored it.

  • Trade location data was shallow and scattered. No grouping, no hierarchy — countries, ports, and locations just floated.

  • The one useful action was trapped. "View Shipment," the bridge to deeper data, lived inside a single tab, breaking the workflow every time users went back for it.

  • No narrative. The numbers never added up to a story a decision could rest on.

The behavioural evidence: engagement sat at 10–15%, most users spent under 20 seconds, and the majority dropped off after clicking a single radio button.

The core realisation: we weren't short on data — we were short on narrative. The raw trade activity was all there; it just wasn't shaped into something a person could read and act on.

Team & my role

I was the Product Designer driving this redesign end-to-end within a small team of a Design Lead, PM, Data Analyst, and me.

  • Owned the problem framing, information architecture, interaction design, and high-fidelity UI across all three iterations.

  • Worked closely with the Data Analyst to decide which metrics genuinely drive decisions for each user group — the difference between showing "shipment count" and showing "top supplier from / top trade routes / total ports of lading."

  • Partnered with the PM on scope and success metrics, and with the Design Lead on direction and critique.

Constraints & roadblocks

  • A high-traffic surface. As the most-visited section of the profile, it had to be reshaped without disrupting the users already relying on it daily.

  • Reshape, don't rebuild the data. The data model was sound; the fix had to come from information architecture and the reading experience, not new data sources.

  • A 6-week timeline to move from problem framing through three iterations to a shippable redesign.

  • Users under time pressure. Every second of friction on an unfamiliar company directly cost a qualification decision — the design had to earn attention in seconds.

  • Learned avoidance. With engagement stuck at 10–15%, many users had already trained themselves to skip the section — so the redesign had to actively re-earn attention, not just present the data more neatly.

Key decisions

  • Reframe the goal from presenting data to delivering decisions — restructure around how each user reads a footprint.

  • Replace radio-button toggles with one scrollable, top-down flow that moves from global (country) to granular (location).

  • Make "View Shipment" universally accessible across every section, ending the back-and-forth that broke workflows.

  • Lead each block with decision-driving metrics, with depth available on demand rather than mandatory.

  • Consolidate redundant tabs and merge Trade Lanes + Ports into one streamlined view of where a company ships and to whom.

Design solution

The redesign was a three-phase evolution — from grouping the data, to making it feel like insight, to sequencing it into a single decision path. I treated it as a progression, not a single redesign: each phase tested a hypothesis about why users weren't reading the section, and the answer to one shaped the next.

PHASE 1 ( Group the data by how people think)

Hypothesis: users can't build a footprint from disconnected toggles.

  • Replaced radio buttons with vertical tab navigation and three structured segments — Countries (top trade partners), Ports (high-frequency gateways), Locations (physical trade touchpoints).

  • Made the map functional with hover states and pin clustering.

  • Added subheadings and helper text for orientation.

Outcome: cleaner segmentation, but interaction stayed low. Flat visuals and weak hierarchy meant it still didn't pull users in. Grouping alone wasn't enough.

PHASE 2 ( Make the data feel like insight)

Hypothesis: users need the decision-driving numbers surfaced, not buried.

  • Introduced visual data blocks that put high-value signals up front — top trading countries, major ports, and HS codes tuned to the user's niche.

  • Repositioned "View Shipment" for universal access across all tabs, killing the workflow-breaking back-and-forth.

  • Added loading skeletons for perceived performance, plus tooltips and info chips for transparency.

Outcome: far more skimmable — but without a guiding layout it still read as a collection of blocks, not a journey. Scannability improved; sense-making didn't fully.

PHASE 3 (Final) (One scrollable, context-rich decision path)

Hypothesis: users understand a company best when the view moves from global to granular, in one flow.

  • Inline sectioning instead of tabs. Country → Port → Location data flows in a single scrollable, top-down layout, so the whole footprint reads as one story.

  • Metrics at a glance, depth on demand. Each block leads with high-value numbers and expands into deeper views (e.g. a port's role in the company's network) for users who want to investigate.

  • Contextual labels that name the insight, not just the field: "Top Supplier from," "Total ports of lading/unlading," "Top Trade Routes," "Importing/Exporting Location."

  • Consolidated redundant tabs and merged Trade Lanes + Ports into one streamlined view.

Why it worked: the section stopped being a data dump and became a decision journey global (country) to granular (location) with the visuals finally answering where, what, and how much. No more toggling, no more isolated maps.

Outcome

Each number traces back to a specific decision:

  • Engagement 15% → 58% — replacing toggles with one scrollable flow removed the "click, remember, click again" tax that was driving single-interaction drop-off.

  • Time on section ↑ 2.2× — the global-to-granular journey and expandable depth gave users a reason to keep reading instead of bouncing in 20 seconds.

  • +32% downstream actions — universal "View Shipment" turned the section from a dead end into a launchpad into deeper data.

The throughline: I redesigned around the user's decision, and the metrics followed.

Learnings & growth

  • The job wasn't to present data better — it was to make it useful, digestible, and actionable for a specific person under time pressure.

  • Break complex datasets into user-centric, modular views and sequence them; the order of information mattered as much as the content.

  • Design for progressive understanding, not just polish — depth should be available, not mandatory.

  • Collaborate deeply with data teams to define which metrics are genuinely decision-driving; the design is only as good as the signals it surfaces.

What's next

  • Timeline filters — see a company's trade evolution over months and years.

  • "Compare with Peer" mode — benchmark two companies' trade behaviour side by side.

  • Smart alerts — flag sudden drops or spikes in a company's trade routes.

  • Exportable reports by section (Country / Port / Location) for offline decisions.

  • Extend the pattern to other profile sections to improve how the whole Company Profile communicates.