What changed
- Product strategy
- A 60-second fully automated journey: design friction removedControlled automation: user agency and creative control kept
- The redesign project
- Two previous attempts had failedCompleted over nine months; the team grew from three into full implementation teams
- Executive buy-in
- Leadership backed a direction that contradicted their own original intuition
The mobile prototype tested well: it showed the design experience could work on a small screen. The larger result was strategic: leadership changed the product approach from full automation to controlled automation. The redesign that had failed twice was finished, over nine months, scaling from a team of three into larger implementation teams.
What I took from it
Data on its own does not change a decision, you have to make it undeniable. When research contradicts leadership intuition, a slide deck will not do it. A prototype that puts users in control will.
It also fixed something for me about strategy: the best product direction does not start from efficiency metrics. It starts from what users actually value. Sometimes the thing you are trying to optimise away is the thing they love most.
Read the full case study
The starting point
Spreadshirt was running on an assumption that felt obviously right at the top: shop owners want speed. The leadership vision was a 60-second journey, pick a template, let it customise itself, ship. Efficient, scalable, clean.
The company had tried to redesign the seller experience twice before, and failed both times. I was brought in to lead the third attempt. I started with one question: what if the assumption was wrong?
What the research found
I went and talked to shop owners. Not surveys, not analytics: conversations.
What they told me contradicted the leadership vision outright. They did not want the design process automated away. For them the t-shirt designer was the best part of their day, not friction to get through. They valued creative control over speed. The creative process was the product.
That was not a small note in the margins. It meant the entire 60-second automation strategy was pointed the wrong way.
Making the research undeniable
The data said one thing and executive intuition said another, and two earlier attempts had already failed. A presentation was not going to move that.
So I built a prototype: a mobile version of the t-shirt designer, put directly into users' hands. The point was not to prove mobile was technically possible. It was to show that the design experience itself was worth keeping, that it held up, and still felt good, even on a small screen.
The approach
User interviews
In-depth conversations with shop owners, which surfaced that the design process was the emotional core of their experience, not friction to remove.
A research prototype
A mobile t-shirt designer built in Axure RP with the UI designers over one intensive week, made to provoke user feedback, not to ship.
Executive workshops
Workshops with the executive team and business-unit leadership, presenting findings that contradicted the leadership assumption about automation.
User testing
Tested the prototype with real users. The response was strongly positive, and showed the full desktop experience could work on mobile.