Case study · SaaS / Web platform · 2025
Redesigning a multi-sided platform for hotels, influencers & campaign operations
A ground-up rebuild of a three-sided marketplace, onboarding, campaign creation, and role-based dashboards for hotels, influencers, and the internal team, unified by a design system built to scale.
- Role
- Product Designer
- Timeline
- ~4 months · 2025
- Team
- 1 designer (me) · 2 engineers · 1 PM
- Platform
- Responsive web · React
01Overview
One designer, the entire product
A fast-growing, three-sided product that had outgrown its original design. My job: make it easier to use, and to run, for everyone on it.
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Hero / cover shot
A polished collage of the redesigned hotel, influencer, and internal dashboards, or a single strong screen. Sets the tone before anyone reads.
Ownership
Product designer, end to end, research and IA through final UI, and the design system, which I built in code alongside the team.
Nooon connects hotels with influencers through campaign-based collaborations.
Hotels create campaigns. Influencers discover and join them. The Nooon team keeps it all running. One shared workflow, three genuinely different jobs to design for.
The product ecosystem
Not a single dashboard, a three-sided marketplace
Hotels
Create & manage campaigns
Define offerings, invite collaboration, track activity.
Campaigns
The shared unit of work
Where offers, rooms, benefits & collaboration meet.
Influencers
Discover & participate
Find campaigns, apply, manage collaborations.
Nooon Team, operational layer
Manages, approves & coordinates the ecosystem
Campaigns, users, approvals, and support across all roles.
How it works today
2.0, Current flow of how a campaign is executed
02Research
Getting to the real problem
Four angles on the same product, the internal team, both sets of users, the existing flows, and the market.
Internal team
Stakeholder interviews
The team held the workflow together by hand, their workarounds showed how campaigns really moved, and where the product fell short.
Both sides
User interviews
Semi-structured sessions with hotels and influencers, listening for where they hesitated, not what they “liked.”
Existing product
UX audit
A heuristic walkthrough of every core flow, onboarding, dashboards, campaign creation, to map friction firsthand.
Market
Competitive analysis
How adjacent marketplace and onboarding products solve the same jobs, what to borrow, what to avoid.
What I heard
“This feels like a lot of setup before I can actually use it.”
“After logging in, I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do first.”
“I just wanted to create a campaign, but I had to keep jumping between tabs.”
“I didn't understand where to start.”
“I had to ask the Nooon team what to do next.”
03What surfaced
The product was built around itself, not the user
The five recurring patterns, and the screens behind them.
Where hotels struggled
1A long onboarding
A lot of information required before any value.
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Old onboarding, 3–5 screens
Show the real onboarding screens in sequence. One annotation: “high upfront effort.”
2A dashboard that didn't point anywhere
Full of information, but no clear next step.
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Old hotel dashboard
Annotate only 2–3 things: no obvious primary action, competing information, no clear next step.
3Fragmented campaign creation
One campaign meant hopping between sections: leave to add a Room, leave again for Benefits, come back to finish.
↩ The user has to backtrack across sections to finish one task.
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The fragmented flow, with real UI
Cropped screenshots of Campaign → Rooms → Benefits → Campaign, connected by arrows. One of the strongest visuals in the case study.
Where influencers struggled
4Unclear navigation
No clear model of where to start, what's relevant, or what to do next.
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Old influencer dashboard
Highlight navigation, campaign discovery, status/activity, and the primary action.
5Dependency on internal support
The team kept guiding users through the basics, a sign the product wasn't explaining itself.
The real problem
Not a visual refresh. The product's structure made people work too hard, and that's what the redesign set out to change.
04Strategy
Make it easier to enter, understand, and complete
One principle behind every decision that followed.
Every decision traced back to a finding
- Too much setup
- Progressive onboarding
- Users don't know what to do
- Action-driven dashboards
- Campaign workflow is fragmented
- Guided campaign creation
- Users need manual support
- Self-serve, role-specific experiences
05Solution
Designed around the problems, not the screens
Each move answers a problem the research surfaced.
01Progressive onboardingActivation
Onboarding front-loaded everything. Now it asks only for what's needed to start; the rest is completed inside the product, in context, once its value is clear.
The bet
Get people to value first. Depth can wait.
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Progressive onboarding
The streamlined start, essentials first, the rest completed in context.
02From fragmented setup to guided campaign creationCore workflow
Campaign creation was split across separate sections. Now rooms and benefits live inside a single guided flow, the product follows the task instead of its own architecture.
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The guided campaign builder
Show the builder with a clear step indicator, ideally 2–3 steps together. Make this the largest visual on the page.
03From information-heavy to action-drivenHotel dashboard
The old dashboard displayed data but answered nothing. The new hierarchy leads with the primary action, then active campaigns, what needs attention, and performance, a workspace, not a readout.
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Action-driven hotel dashboard
Primary action first, then active campaigns and what needs attention.
04A clearer path for influencersInfluencer experience
Navigation now follows the influencer's real jobs, discover, apply, track status, manage collaborations, so participation makes sense without anyone explaining it.
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Redesigned influencer dashboard
Discovery, applications, and active collaborations in one place.
05An operations layer built to scaleInternal operations
A marketplace only scales if its operators do. The internal console gives the team one view of campaign status, activity, approvals, and support, the manual chasing designed out.
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Internal Nooon dashboard
One large screen with 3–4 meaningful callouts: campaign status, user activity, approvals, support.
06Design system
One language across three roles
A reusable foundation that keeps a multi-role product consistent, and faster to build on.
Foundations & components
Not a set of isolated screens, but a shared toolkit, tokens, components, and patterns built to mirror the codebase. Tokens fed straight into the front-end, so handoff stopped being a translation step.
Design ↔ engineering
I built the core components in code with the team, same names, same props as the design, so a change was a one-line token edit, not a redraw.
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Design-system board
Show the components actually used in Nooon: type, buttons, inputs, cards, tables, status, navigation, dashboard components.
07Constraints & decisions
The calls that shaped the build
Where design met reality, engineering limits, a fixed timeline, and a few decisions not everyone agreed with.
Engineering pushed back
Single screen → stepped flow
A true one-screen campaign builder meant heavy client-side state. We shipped a stepped flow with autosave instead, cheaper to build, and hotels could leave and resume. The constraint made the product better.
Fixed timeline
What shipped in v1
With a set runway, I sequenced the core loop first, onboarding, campaign creation, the three dashboards, and deferred [secondary feature] so the marketplace could run end to end sooner.
Density vs clarity
Dashboards that survive mobile
The internal team works on the move, so the operational views had to hold up small. It took [N] iterations to keep the information density without the clutter.
08Impact
Product outcomes
Structural results of the redesign, and the direction of the change.
4 → 1
Campaign creation collapsed from a four-stop detour across separate sections into one guided flow.
3
Distinct role-based experiences, hotels, influencers, and the internal team, in place of one generic interface.
1
Design system, built from scratch, replacing one-off UI with a single reusable language.
↓
Fewer steps to first value
People reach a working product sooner, instead of stalling in setup.
↓
Less reliance on the team
Core tasks became self-serve, so the team stopped hand-holding the basics.
↑
Room to grow
New capabilities route to the role that needs them, not onto one crowded screen.
09Learnings
What this project taught me
Simplicity comes from structure
The wins came from organising existing features around a clearer workflow, not removing them.
Users think in outcomes, not architecture
People come to accomplish something, not to navigate a system. The interface should mirror the goal.
Multi-sided products need role clarity
Shared ecosystem, different goals. One interface for everyone just adds complexity.
If I ran it back
What I'd do differently
Instrument before shipping
We launched ahead of analytics, so these outcomes are still qualitative. I'd wire event tracking into onboarding and campaign creation from day one, the funnel is where this design should be judged.
Solve the internal console first
The team was the real bottleneck. Redesigning their operational view earlier would have unblocked hotels and influencers downstream sooner.
The takeaway
Good product design isn't about making a complex system look simpler. It's about making the system itself easier to understand.
Thanks for reading.
A messy, multi-sided product, restructured around how people actually work. Happy to walk through the decisions and trade-offs.