Case Study 03 · Research & Design Systems
ShootProof had a product full of features and a team full of opinions. Before writing a single component spec, I went and talked to the people actually using it.
ShootProof is a platform built for professional photographers — gallery delivery, client contracts, invoicing, and everything in between. By the time I joined, the product had years of feature additions layered on top of one another, each one solving a problem someone thought photographers had. The catch: nobody had gone back to verify.
I came in as both a design manager and an IC, responsible for research, strategy, and ultimately the design system that would bring coherence to a product that had outgrown itself. The work wasn't glamorous at the start. It was 40+ interviews, a service blueprint that took weeks to validate, and months of component work — all before a single new screen shipped. That discipline is what made the outcome possible: a 2.3× lift in user retention.
The product had accumulated years of additions — each shipped with conviction, few validated after launch. Nobody knew which features were driving value and which were just adding noise.
Components were inconsistent across the platform. Buttons, forms, and layouts had drifted into a dozen variations. Building anything new meant reinventing decisions that should have already been made.
Retention was underperforming, but the data wasn't telling us why. Quantitative signals pointed to drop-off moments; they didn't explain the reasoning behind them.
The organizational default was toward velocity. Making the case for a research-first approach — before touching a single component — required leadership alignment and a credible plan for how learning would accelerate, not delay, delivery.
Research at ShootProof wasn't a phase — it was a prerequisite. I designed and led a structured interview program targeting active photographers across different business stages: emerging, established, and studio-scale. The goal wasn't feature validation. It was understanding how photographers actually ran their businesses, where ShootProof fit into that workflow, and where it created friction instead of flow.
Recruited across ShootProof's customer segments — from solo portrait photographers to multi-shooter wedding studios. Intentional variation in business size, experience level, and shooting specialization.
Sessions were structured around workflow walkthroughs, not hypotheticals. Participants showed us how they ran their post-shoot process — which revealed where ShootProof was genuinely embedded and where it was being worked around.
Affinity mapped across 40+ sessions to surface consistent themes. The patterns were clear: photographers didn't struggle with the features — they struggled with how the features connected to each other.
Translated findings into a leadership-facing narrative — not a research report, but a strategic brief that reframed the product roadmap around verified user needs rather than internal assumptions.
What the interviews revealed was bigger than any single screen: photographers weren't experiencing ShootProof as a product — they were experiencing it as one node in a much larger workflow. Booking, shooting, culling, editing, delivering, invoicing, following up. ShootProof touched parts of that journey. Understanding which parts, and how well, required a service blueprint.
The blueprint mapped the full photographer-client journey end-to-end — frontstage interactions, backstage processes, and the supporting systems behind each. It surfaced three critical insights: the moments where ShootProof created genuine delight, the handoff points where photographers dropped out of the platform and into manual workarounds, and the latent needs the product hadn't yet addressed at all.
This wasn't just documentation. It became the shared strategic frame for design, product, and engineering — a single source of truth for prioritization decisions that had previously been made on gut instinct.
"The blueprint didn't show us what to build next. It showed us why we'd been building the wrong things — and gave us the language to make a credible case for changing direction."
With strategy in place, the design system work had a mandate it previously lacked: not just visual consistency, but structural alignment with how users actually moved through the product. Every component decision was informed by the research. Every pattern was validated against the journey map. Nothing was built speculatively.
Established a design token system for color, typography, spacing, and elevation — creating a shared language between design and engineering that eliminated the translation loss that had been slowing delivery.
Built 200+ components with documented usage guidelines, interaction states, and accessibility requirements baked in from the start — not retrofitted after the fact.
Wrote usage guidance for complex interaction patterns — forms, gallery views, multi-step flows — so that future designers could build consistently without reinventing decisions already made.
Established a lightweight contribution and review process so the system could evolve without degrading. A design system without governance is just a library waiting to drift.
Research is the fastest path to the right solution. Slowing down to listen shortened the total delivery timeline by eliminating false starts and rework cycles.
Strategy before systems. A design system built without strategic context is just organized inconsistency. The blueprint gave every component decision a reason to exist.
Systems work is leadership work. Building 200+ components is a technical achievement. Getting a team to adopt and maintain them — that's a culture problem, and culture problems require leadership to solve.
Retention is a design metric. A 2.3× lift in retention didn't come from a single feature — it came from reducing friction across the entire journey. That only happens when you understand the journey first.
The Impact
Structured research sessions with professional photographers across business sizes, specializations, and platform tenures — before a single design decision was made.
A fully documented component library with token architecture, interaction states, and contribution governance — built to scale with the product, not just the current team.
User retention more than doubled after strategic platform changes informed by research. Not a single feature — a systems-level outcome from understanding the full journey.
The service blueprint became the shared strategic reference for design, product, and engineering — replacing gut-instinct prioritization with evidence-backed decision making.