Canadian Largest Influencer Marketing Platform
EMBOLD
Embold is a Canadian influencer marketing platform that simplifies working with influencers, supporting over 500 brands with a network of 12,000+ Canadian influencers.
Duration
June 2020 - Sep 2024
Industry
Creative & Digital Media
Scope of work
Website Design
Product Design
SAAS
Role
As the Product Designer at Embold, I lead user research, design sprints, and drive product strategy to enhance user experience for Canadian brands and agencies.
Meet our users
Market Research: Competitor Analysis
OBSERVATIONS
Most platforms offer clean onboarding with task-oriented flows
Dashboards highlight key performance indicators (KPIs) prominently
Influencer discovery features often include smart filters and profile previews
Support and help centers are clearly accessible and often context-aware
Platforms emphasize clarity and reduce decision fatigue through progressive disclosure
Key Learnings from Competitor Analysis
Guided Onboarding
Competitors use step-by-step onboarding to reduce friction and improve activation.
Roster Management
Platforms offer centralized tools to organize, filter, and manage influencer relationships at scale.
Analytics Are MOST IMP
Real-time performance data is easily accessible, boosting transparency and decision-making.
Built-in Collaboration
Integrated messaging and approval flows streamline communication between users.
FOCUS GROUP + USER INTERVIEWS
RESEARCH GOALS
Understand influencer pain points during campaign collaboration
Uncover recurring support issues surfaced by the Customer Success team
Identify key motivations, blockers, and usage patterns
Validate assumptions about the onboarding and campaign experience
Inform the redesign with insights from both internal and external users
RECRUITMENT AND RESEARCH MATERIAL
I conducted a focus group with Embold’s Customer Success team to gather internal insights on user behavior and platform challenges. In parallel, I ran 1:1 interviews with active influencers to understand their real-world pain points. These internal and external perspectives shaped the foundation for usability testing.
Key Takeaways from User Interviews
Sometimes I don’t even know if my content was accepted or if I’m supposed to fix something. There's no clear feedback.
— Interviewed Influencer
I started by mapping out core user flows and content logic using quick sketches and low-fidelity wireframes. This phase allowed rapid iteration and early validation before moving into high-fidelity design.
Global Style Guide & Design System
To ensure consistency across the product, I built a comprehensive design system for Embold — including colors, typography, elevations, and a full library of reusable components with multiple variants and states.
This scalable system streamlined development handoffs, improved design velocity, and helped maintain a unified user experience across all screens. From buttons and inputs to full-page templates, everything was modular, accessible, and aligned with brand guidelines.
Streamlining Influencer Search with Intent-Based Paths
The original search flow funneled all users through one rigid path, causing friction and poor search results. Based on user and team feedback, I introduced three distinct paths: Quick Search, Advanced Search, and Recommended Influencers.
Each path now aligns with different user intents, reducing cognitive load and improving efficiency. This redesign made search faster, more flexible, and tailored to how users actually explore and select influencers.
From Chaos to Clarity: Revamping the Content Submission Experience
The old design lacked intuitive search, clear status indicators, and smart content organization — forcing users to struggle with clunky filters and limited context. In the new design, I introduced advanced search and sorting options, integrated a collapsible chat for better spacing, and added detailed submission metadata and status tags. This not only streamlined user workflows but also made content review faster, cleaner, and more user-friendly.
Redesigned for Insightful Profiles & Instant Decisions
The old profile design buried key information and made influencer evaluation feel slow and fragmented. I introduced a cleaner layout, added user reviews for quick decision-making, and used intuitive icons to make essential data scannable at a glance. A consistent card component and quick profile linking now enhance usability — helping users make confident, informed choices faster than ever.
Visual Design for No-Code Web Experience
Alongside product design, I also created custom graphics and bento-style content cards for Embold’s no-code marketing website. These visual components helped communicate features clearly, highlight user benefits, and maintain a cohesive brand identity across the site.
Manager testimonial
Abdullah Al-Wadeiah
Head of Product at Embold
What would I do differently?
Involve developers earlier in the design process to better align feasibility and UX priorities
Spend more time refining search logic and user flows before diving into UI polish
Challenges
Balancing business requirements with technical limitations and development constraints
Designing for three distinct user types while maintaining a unified experience
Coordinating across multiple teams (design, dev, customer success) during tight deadlines
Learnings
Gained hands-on experience designing within a live SaaS product at scale
Learned to translate user feedback into clear design actions and feature improvements
Created detailed user flows and interaction models for multi-role platforms
Developed empathy for both influencer and brand needs, informing UX decisions across the board