Pocket-Ready Design: Where Insights Shape Effortless Mobile Experiences

Grounds

To decide whether a mobile experience was worth pursuing, we first needed to understand its current usage. Diving into our Posthog dashboard, we expected near-zero mobile engagement—but we were surprised to find significant traffic.

The high bounce rate was no surprise, given the experience barely functioned. Still, it confirmed user interest in accessing the platform on mobile.

“It’s interesting to see who uses it—and keeps returning—despite how broken it is,” one frontend lead remarked during an interview. Surprisingly, we found such a user: a CTO repeatedly accessing analytics and order insights.

Another key finding was a spike in Free Trial users—aligned with our Product-Led Sales initiative. We concluded that prospects often vet our product through mobile, making it a crucial entry point for first impressions.

Quality Over Quantity

Given the broken state of our mobile experience, we knew quantitative data alone wouldn’t provide the full picture. We leaned on qualitative research, engaging internal stakeholders with deep product knowledge—engineers, product managers, customer success reps, global services, and functional specialists.

With only two weeks, we had to quickly sketch mockups to visualize our ideas and validated them through stakeholder interviews. Each interview focused on two aspects: feature usage and customer insights, followed by a quick prototype walkthrough.

From these conversations, we gained invaluable insights about user behaviour, expectations, and workarounds. These findings became the backbone of our design evolution.

Evolution through Learnings

With our research guiding us, we honed in on key on-the-go use cases for mobile:

1. Time-sensitive issue resolution: Pulling live promotions or disabling user access.

2. Simplified tasks: Reserving complex, error-prone actions for desktop.

3. Actionable notifications: Keeping users informed of key updates and needs for user action.

4. Quick sharing and bookmarking: Supporting collaboration and enabling users to resume tasks later.

5. Customization: Allowing users to surface information relevant to them.

6. High-level analytics: Catering to leadership who need concise, big-picture insights.

Circling Back to the Primary Experience

One of our main goals is to bring insights back to our primary desktop experience. Key takeaways included:

• Notifications: Users found notifications critical for staying on top of important actions, which were entirely absent from our platform.

• Customization: Current reliance on object IDs (e.g., random strings) made tasks frustrating and error-prone. Allowing users to choose meaningful identifiers became a priority.

• Ease of navigation: Tasks like data erasure required jumping between screens to manually input IDs—often inaccessible and buried in the URL.

Mobile’s constraints helped us prioritize essentials, influencing broader platform updates.

Back to Basics

When my frontend engineer shared her ideas, I jumped in almost instantly.

For a while, I’d been craving the chance to do some truly grounded design work—designs that weren’t rushed or reactive, but built on thoughtful, intentional decisions. Too often, we were chasing the next cool feature, rushing to deliver, or iterating reactively.

On desktop, it’s tempting to fill the wide canvas with features and options. But is that the right approach? Too many choices can overwhelm users, creating cognitive overload. Where would they focus? Where would they start?

Despite the creative freedom we enjoyed, we grounded every decision in extensive research and user interviews.

A Surprisingly Rewarding Wrap

When we first proposed the project, we faced skepticism and even objections. Our technical director questioned whether mobile was meaningful enough to tackle and worried it wouldn’t foster growth. The customer success team shared concerns about exposing users to potential errors, deeming it too risky.

But as we shared our findings, perspectives shifted.

At the end of the hacksprint, teams presented their work for voting in four categories: Best for Customer, Best for Internal Tools, Best for Product, and My Favourite. To our surprise, we were nominated in all four categories, placing second in three—even in “Best for Internal Tools” (giggle 🤭)!

Unbelievable, considering we had little more than a Figma prototype while other teams delivered fully developed projects.

It was the first time our company celebrated something so design-focused, and not just an end delivery. Our technical director went from being skeptical to our biggest advocate, encouraging us to share our findings beyond the hacksprint, across teams.

This recognition—and the opportunity to push design’s boundaries—made this project truly unforgettable.