CI Platform Redesign
As the lead designer, I led persona-driven discovery, navigation framework design, scenario authoring, and a finalized wireframe set for Experian Hitwise's flagship Competitive Intelligence platform — replacing module-by-module reporting with a unified IA built around how brand marketers, agency planners, and analysts actually use the product.
4
Personas spanning small business, manager, expert, and novice
5
Top-level sections in the new IA
35
Finalized wireframe pages
4
End-to-end scenarios validated in the wireframes
Four personas, one platform
Stakeholder interviews and customer research collapsed into four personas — the Small Business Owner, the Manager, the Expert Analyst, and the Novice User. Every downstream decision — navigation, defaults, scenario design — was evaluated against this set. Cycle through each persona below to see the full profile.
- Reposition Hitwise from a reporting tool into a competitive intelligence platform
- Reduce time-to-first-insight for brand-side marketers and agency planners
- Make the platform learnable enough to demo and sell without a training session
- Give power-users (analysts) deeper, faster workflows without breaking newcomers
- Establish one consistent navigation framework across Dashboards, Reports, Answers, Preferences, and Resources
- Move from blank-state reports to opinionated default views with in-context insights
- Make Mosaic, audience profiling, and media-plan workflows save and resume cleanly
- Surface 'next-best-action' insight prompts directly on charts and tables
One navigation framework, five sections, two contextual rails
The old Hitwise was organized by report type. The redesign reframes it around five top-level destinations (Dashboards, Reports, Answers, Preferences, Resources), plus two contextual rails — Tools and Manage Lists — that re-skin themselves to the current section. Insights and Answers are transient nav items that only exist during a live session, giving users a path back to the report overview kicked off from the home page.
Four scenarios drove every wireframe decision
Instead of designing screens, we designed end-to-end flows for the real jobs each persona showed up to do. Every wireframe in the set had to serve at least one of these scenarios, and every drilldown had to land somewhere already on the map.
Scenario 01 · Insights
Single-site and multi-site overviews
From the home page, the user kicks off an Insights run on one or several sites. The platform composes a Subject Overview — search terms, upstream/downstream clickstream, Mosaic profile, and paid vs. organic share — that can be added to a Dashboard or drilled into a full Run Report.
Scenario 02 · Answers
Question-led entry for non-analysts
Marketers who don't think in modules ask a question — 'who's stealing my brand traffic?' — and the platform routes them to the right module, with the right default report, the right defaults already applied, and an option to refine preferences in-page.
Scenario 03 · Run Report
Analyst drilldown with in-chart insights
From a Website Rankings report, the analyst clicks a spike on the chart and an on-hover layer surfaces four contextual insight prompts — clickstream, search terms, audience profile, ranking — each of which jumps into the matching report with the right filters pre-applied.
Scenario 04 · Manage Lists
Custom categories and portfolios that persist
Subjects selected inside any report can be added to a Custom Category or Portfolio from the same widget — making the firm's taxonomy a first-class object that survives across reports, dashboards, and team members.
Finalized, annotated, build-ready
Thirty-five fully annotated pages spanning the navigation framework, screen flows, default Dashboards, Insights overviews, Reports, Profile Audiences with Mosaic, Preferences, and Manage Lists.
What the redesign unlocked
One IA, every audience
Brand marketers, agency planners, analysts, and internal CS share a single navigation model — same five sections, same Tools and Manage Lists rails everywhere.
Defaults instead of blank states
Dashboards and Reports open with opinionated, useful content on first load. Mosaic, Audience, and Media Plan workflows save and resume cleanly.
Insights on the chart, not in a menu
On-hover insight prompts on charts route users from a spike to the underlying clickstream, search-term, or audience report in one click.
Custom categories as first-class objects
Subjects selected anywhere in the platform can be added to a Custom Category or Portfolio that persists across reports, dashboards, and team members.
Interested in this kind of work?
Persona-driven discovery, IA, and wireframes that ship — designed for power-users without leaving newcomers behind.