Norde Collective
Project Details
Client:
Norde Collective
Year:
2025
Industry:
B2B SaaS / Productivity
Duration:
8 Weeks
Services:
Web Design
Web Development
Overview
Norde Collective builds async collaboration tools for distributed teams. By the time they approached us, the product had grown through three years of feature additions without a corresponding investment in design. The interface worked — barely — but it punished new users. Onboarding completion sat at 34%, and support tickets in the first 7 days of account activation were disproportionately high. The founding team knew the product had real value but couldn't understand why so many users were churning before they ever reached it. We were brought in to audit the full product experience, identify where value was being buried, and redesign the critical paths that determined whether a new user stayed or left.
Challenges
The existing design had no system behind it — components had been created and recreated independently across different parts of the product, resulting in 14 different button styles and inconsistent spacing that made everything feel slightly wrong without users being able to articulate why. More critically, the onboarding flow asked new users to configure too many preferences before they had experienced any value. Users were being asked to commit before they understood what they were committing to. Rebuilding the onboarding meant challenging assumptions the product team had held for years, which required us to lead with user research data rather than design opinions. We ran 12 moderated user sessions in week one before proposing a single change.
Conclusion
The redesign centred on a single principle: show value before asking for configuration. The new onboarding puts users inside a working demo environment within 90 seconds of signup, letting them experience the product's core loop before completing any setup steps. A new design system — 240 components, fully documented — brought visual consistency across the entire product. The dashboard was restructured around the actions teams actually perform most, not the features the product team were proudest of. Within 90 days of launch, onboarding completion rose from 34% to 71%, and monthly churn fell by 18%. The support team reported a 40% drop in first-week tickets.
