Mable Analytics

Mable helps organizations make data-driven decisions through analytics and reporting tools. The business model is SaaS — which means activation isn't just a UX metric. It's a revenue signal. Users who don't reach meaningful outcomes in their first sessions rarely come back. They churn quietly, without explaining why. Every unnecessary step during onboarding was a drop-off risk. The product team knew this. What they needed was a clear read on where the experience was breaking and a design approach that fixed it without a full rebuild.

Research sessions, product analytics review, and stakeholder discussions surfaced three patterns that kept coming up:

• Time to value was too slow: Users spent significant time in configuration before they experienced anything useful. The product had strong capabilities — but the path to them was buried under setup steps that could have waited.
• The onboarding journey had no sense of momentum: Users couldn't tell how far through setup they were, what came next, or whether they were making progress toward something meaningful. Completion felt arbitrary.
• Modules felt like separate products: Visual patterns, interaction conventions, and labeling varied enough across the platform that context-switching between sections added cognitive overhead. Users had to relearn behaviors that should have been consistent.

These shaped every decision across the project:

• Reduce time to value: The first session should show users what the product can do for them — not ask them to prove they're ready for it.
• Guide progression: Onboarding needs a shape. Users should know where they are, what's next, and why it matters.
• Simplify decisions: Every choice during setup has a cost. If a decision can be deferred, default it. If it can be removed, remove it.
• Build for consistency: A design system isn't a style guide. It's the thing that makes the product feel like one product instead of several.

Onboarding redesign. The restructured onboarding flow led with outcomes, not configuration. Users saw relevant value — a sample report, a pre-populated dashboard, something concrete — before being asked to set anything up. Configuration steps that weren't immediately necessary were moved downstream. The first session became about demonstrating the product, not gating it. Activation framework. A guided experience layer tracked where users were in their setup and surfaced the next meaningful action contextually. Not a checklist in a sidebar — actual in-product prompts tied to what users were looking at. Users who were close to activating a feature got a nudge toward it. Users who had completed setup got pushed toward first real use. Information architecture. Navigation was reorganized around user workflows rather than product modules. The hierarchy was flattened in places where users were drilling through multiple levels to reach common tasks. Labels were rewritten to reflect what users were doing, not what the system was doing. Design system. Component patterns, spacing conventions, and interaction behaviors were standardized across the platform. The system was built to be used by the engineering team going forward — documented, scalable, and opinionated enough to prevent the drift that had created inconsistency in the first place.

Prototype sessions with actual users, not assumptions. The first pass at the onboarding flow tried to do too much in the first screen — too many options presented as equally important. Users stalled. We trimmed the opening to a single decision and moved everything else to a secondary step. The activation prompts initially surfaced based on time — a nudge after X seconds of inactivity. Users found them intrusive. We switched to context-based triggers tied to specific actions (or non-actions) within relevant sections. That felt useful instead of pushy. The design system documentation was initially too abstract for the engineering team to use efficiently. We rebuilt the component library around real screen examples rather than isolated components, which closed the gap between design and implementation faster.

The activation improvement was the headline. The design system was the longer-term investment — it gave the team a way to maintain consistency without design review on every component decision.