Fusion for Unilever

Scaling Innovation Business Planning (IBP) Process for Unilever Across North America

User Experience

Research

User Interface

Concepts

User Interviews

Design Systems

Testing

Design Mgmnt

Design Strategy

Time line

Nov '22 - May '23

Team

1 Designer(myself) , 3 Developers,

2 Data analysts,

1 Business Analyst, 1 Product Owner.

Fusion is a WebApp based control tower that drives accountability and discipline by tracking deliverables vs plans across multiple processes in the Innovation Planning (IBP) cycle.

This project involves redesigning and rebuilding an existing Power App into a scalable web application.

outcomes

3X

Improved Business

This impacted the overall business success and improved the efficiency by the faster report generation practices.

8000

hrs

Human efforts are saved every year

The new design saved huge amount of unwanted time spent when completing the tasks for the entire team comprising between 8-13 people.

95%

User satisfaction reported

Post design usability study reported that users enjoys using the new application with the new design providing very few feedbacks.

my role

Led the project end-to-end from a design perspective overseeing user research, discovery, design strategy, detailed breakdowns, design excecutions and stakeholder management.

Problem

The existing Power App is unable to handle large data sets and lacks the scalability required to support product performance tracking across the multiple regions of the USA and Canada.Also the inability of users to finalize their tracking process in a timely manner led to a postponement in the generation of reports for executive-level individuals. This caused a subsequent delay in the assessment of the performance of a brand or product in the marketplace.

BUSINESS GOALS

Empower teams to quickly understand and adopt IBP process by designing a clear, intuitive, and welcoming onboarding experience that reduces confusion and encourages active use from day one.

Transform & Modernise

Transform the current tool which is in a power app to web app for faster access and to bring improvement in-terms of User experience and to modernise the tool.

Fasten the tracking

Find a solution to streamline and redesign to build a web app that helps users to do quicker tracking process. Which also improves better user engagement.

Build a scalable, future-ready system

Support large datasets efficiently with a responsive and optimized design. Scale across geographies, enabling consistent usage across multiple business units in the USA and Canada.

Challenges faced

The project posed several challenges across product complexity, user needs, and collaboration dynamics. As the sole designer, I encountered both strategic and operational hurdles while driving this transformation from a Power App to a scalable web platform.

Collaboration Challenge

Working across different teams (product, business, and engineering) required aligning varied priorities, managing communication gaps, and translating technical limitations into feasible design ideas.

Conducting Research

Conducting remote user interviews across the US and Canada was a challenge — especially in accommodating time zones, aligning questions to different roles, and ensuring unbiased insights.

Process and Business

The internal business process was layered and domain-specific. It took time and effort to fully understand the end-to-end process and translate it into intuitive user flows and simplified task structures.

The Design Process

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Early Discussions

Before I kickstart the design, we had stakeholder sessions to understand the business process which is followed currently, and also understood the actual requirements and goals to achieve.

KEY ITEMS discussed

We Set deadlines and milestones.

what are the key KPI's that need to be achieved along the way?

Identify any constraints or limitations legal or other constraints that will impact the project's goals or objectives?

Connected with people from various tech fronts to understand the technologies that are used and had a ice breaker session with the cross functional team on planning for collaboration.

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Discovery Phase (Research)

We started with research in-order to minimize the hypothesis and guessing around, and to design a product which will match the users’ expectations and business goals.

Research Phase

We started with research in-order to minimize the hypothesis and guessing around, and to design a product which will match the customers’ expectations and business goals.

Actual end Users

Primary Users

They are the brand managers from various teams from the regions of North America that includes countries like USA & Canada.

Secondary Users

They are the senior managers of those brands who monitor the products or brand's performance by generating reports.

Total Users from all regions

4800+

Geography

USA & Canada

Gender Distribution

65%

Male

35%

Female

0%

Others

Age Distribution

19.10% (25-34yrs)

30.30% (35-44yrs)

44.70% (45-54yrs)

5.90% (54-64yrs)

User Interviews

User Interviews were conducted in a moderated way via the video calls, asking the users to answer the set of questions that we prepared.

Interview Context

Method

Remote interviews via video calls

Regions Covered for Interviews

USA & Canada

Duration

60-90 Minutes per participants

Users involved in interviews

20

User SAYINGS

“I feel like I’m drowning in numbers there’s too much data and not enough clarity.”

“It’s hard to make sense of what’s important when everything looks the same.”

“Why are we still doing half of the work in Excel? It defeats the purpose of having a digital tool.”

“If I’m using a tool, I shouldn’t have to switch to email or Excel to complete my tasks.”

“We’re still doing so much offline it would be a game changer if everything were integrated in one place.”

“We need a modern, intuitive system that supports the entire process end-to-end.”

“I want to do everything in one place from tracking to reporting to notifying managers.”

“This should be fast, reliable, and smart enough to reduce my workload, not add to it.”

“Before this tool, we did everything in Excel. It was messy but at least we knew how it worked.”

“Power App was a step forward, but it still feels like a half-baked solution.”

“It’s hard to switch between sections I’m never sure if I’m in the right module or if I’ve missed something.”

User Personas

Anya

Age : 28

Gender : Female

Location : Chicago, USA.

Job Title: Global Brand Manager

Anya is responsible for developing and implementing global brand strategies for a key product line within the FMCG company. This involves market research across different regions, identifying growth opportunities, adapting brand messaging for diverse cultural contexts, and overseeing new product development and launches on a global scale. She works closely with regional marketing teams to ensure brand consistency while allowing for necessary localization.``

Age : 43

Gender : Female

Location : Chicago, USA.

Job Title: Global Brand Manager

Age : 43

Gender : Female

Location : Chicago, USA.

Job Title: Global Brand Manager

Chloe Dubois

Age : 48

Gender : Female

Location : Toronto, Canada

Job Title: Senior Brand Manager

Chloe supports the senior brand managers in developing and executing marketing plans for specific product lines within the Canadian market. Her responsibilities include conducting market research, analyzing competitor activities, assisting with the creation of marketing materials, managing social media presence for the Canadian market, and tracking campaign performance. She is focused on learning the fundamentals of brand management and contributing to the team's overall goals.

Age : 48

Gender : Female

Location : Toronto, Canada

Job Title: Senior Brand Manager

Age : 48

Gender : Female

Location : Toronto, Canada

Job Title: Senior Brand Manager

David Chen

Age : 36

Gender : Male

Location : Newyork City, USA

Job Title: Regional Brand Manager

David Chen is responsible for developing and executing marketing campaigns and initiatives specifically for the Mexican market. This includes adapting global brand guidelines for local relevance, creating localized advertising content, managing relationships with local agencies and retailers, and analyzing campaign performance within Mexico. He works closely with the sales team to drive local sales and market penetration.

Age : 30

Gender : Male

Location : Newyork City, USA

Job Title: Regional Brand Manager

Age : 30

Gender : Male

Location : Newyork City, USA

Job Title: Regional Brand Manager

Key Takeaways

Manual dependencies create inefficiencies

Critical steps like report sharing and team updates still depend on external tools like Excel and email, increasing turnaround time.

Performance is critical

Users report slowness and system lags, which will worsen as data and user base scale.

Data is fragmented and poorly structured

This leads to inefficiencies in filtering, sorting, and retrieving insights at scale.

Navigation is confusing and unintuitive

Users feel lost when switching between modules and brands due to poor IA and lack of structure.

Users are overwhelmed with information

Interfaces show too much raw data without prioritization, increasing cognitive load.

New users are especially frustrated

There is no onboarding, contextual help, or clarity about what to do next.

Lack of consistency and visual clarity

Inconsistent UI elements, unclear labels, and weak visual hierarchy make even simple actions feel heavy.

Users want a modern, unified experience

They desire a professional-grade platform with seamless flow, built-in intelligence, and automated features.

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Ideate & strategize

With clear insights from user interviews and alignment on business goals, the ideation phase was focused on exploring solution directions that balanced scalability, usability, and workflow efficiency. I conducted structured brainstorming and synthesis sessions to define the foundation for the new design.

Users statements gave me the direction to come up with the new simplified flow, with reduced stages and which will focus more on lowering memory load and will help users in decision making.

Framing the Right Problems – HMW Statements

To stimulate ideation, the following HMW (How Might We) statements were framed:

How might we reduce data overload and help users focus only on relevant entries?

How might we improve task clarity and navigation across the five modules?

How might we replace external communication with in-app collaboration?

How might we ensure the tool can scale while maintaining usability and performance?

How might we make the onboarding process more intuitive for new users?

DESIGN goals

01 Guide new users with onboarding and inline assistance.

02 Minimize cognitive load through visual hierarchy, filtering, and contextual layouts.

03 Support scale by designing for 450,000+ products and users across USA and Canada.

04 Reduce user friction by simplifying workflows and enabling automation.

05 Ensure performance tracking is structured, insightful, and actionable

06 Enable consistent reporting and communication between brand managers and leadership.

07 Ensure inclusivity by designing a product that works for diverse user roles, regions, and contexts

08 Establish UI consistency using reusable patterns and a component-based approach

Key ideas generated

Challenge

UX Driven Idea

Navigation Complexity

Consistent left-hand navigation with module progress indicators

Data overload

Create role-specific dashboards with filters, tags, and data grouping

Manual workflows

Embedd smart notifications, status tracking, and export tools

Lack of onboarding

Design a guided walkthrough for new users with contextual help

Poor engagement

Design a visually clean interface with interaction feedback and microcopy guidance

Accessibility needs

Color-blind safe palettes, keyboard-friendly UI, readable font sizes

Collaboration

Add comment feature for each product tracking section

Collaborative Inputs

Reviewed feasibility with tech leads to ensure backend and data services could support ideas.

Validated direction with product owners to align with long-term business strategy.

Shared early concepts in stakeholder showcases for early buy-in and feedback.

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Final Designs

I aimed for a solution in which people would connect with the application emotionally. Something which will bring users back to work and they feel happy and engaged when they use it. I moved into the Design Execution phase to bring those ideas to life through structured UX workflows, user journeys, and interface designs.

User flows

To better understand how users would interact with the redesigned web application, I created a user flow that maps out the journey across the five sequential modules in the Innovation Planning cycle. This flow ensures clarity in task progression, helps identify interaction bottlenecks, and serves as a reference for both design and development teams.

Having a huge data sets with over 4,50,000+ items (combined for all modules) and enabling the users to track and to add other input functionalities for each of those items with a hassle-free experience is a huge challenge.

WIREFRAMES

Started approaching the final UI's by iterating from the rough wireframes for the initial set of screens.

UI Design approach

The overall context is to make it simple that users can easily handle and play with this huge number of items or data. Bringing a very straight forward UI design approach enabling all responses back and forth with the tool and the user ignoring the complexity factor.

At the interaction level, the focus was to help users in decision-making. I focused on minimal gesture-based interaction and showed all the necessary information in the first view.

Interaction and prototyping

The entire tool was designed with all the interactiveness and had a clean connection across screens.

The actual motive of using all the interactions and prototyping is not to just convey the design ideas to developers also helped understanding the stake holders what the designs are actually meant while reviewing with them.

The Solution

After identifying the critical pain points with the current Power App and aligning with both user expectations and business goals, I designed a scalable, user-centered web application to support product performance tracking across the Innovation Planning (IBP) cycle.

This solution was built to address specific needs across usability, scalability, and process automation, ensuring that brand managers and senior stakeholders across the USA and Canada could track, report, and act on performance data efficiently.

Following users mental model

Came up with a design that doesn't disrupt the user's mental model by almost bringing in the look, feel and functions of spreadsheets. The entire process was carried out in a spreadsheet for many years, current users who use excel spread sheet to complete this IBP process, they found it much easier to migrate from spreadsheets to the current web app.

Defining Proper Information Architecture

Improved content discoverability. Reduced cognitive load by organising the content meaningfully. Created a scalable navigation framework for future growth.

Providing Visibility of system statuses

To build trust and reduce user frustration, I focused on making system feedback more immediate, clear, and contextual. During initial user testing, many participants expressed confusion about whether their actions (like saving data, uploading files, or applying filters) had succeeded, often resulting in repeated actions or abandonment.

Reduced Interaction Cost

Enabling Inline table edits, simplified task flows and batch actions like bulk product upload functions. These improvements made the experience feel more fluid and less mentally taxing.

Proper Error Prevention

Optimised error handling across the workflows by clear labels & input constraints, inline error messaging, confirmation dialogs for irreversible actions, disabled states & progressive disclosure.

Improved filtering options

Introduced cutting-edge filter options with superior capabilities allowing the users to pinpoint and find the suitable product from an array of 1000's of items they own. By adding search, filters and segment control conponents.

Real time collaboration

Enabled transparency on every changes by adding comment feature for every item, enabling customers to engage and seek insight from the community to clear up uncertainties. This led to a decrease in unproductive time spent in debates.

Organised Layout

Enables quick scanning and ensured visual hierarchy through the overall structure.

Demo and Support

In app interactive guides for new users, guiding them across the application and also providing proper support documents and links guide users for quicker learnability.

Minimal level Design Systems & Comps

This enabled us to achieve uniformity throughout the software, thereby enriching the users' comprehension of its features. This enabled consistency and standards across the entire application. Simultaneously, it facilitated the creation of a component library that can be utilized across the array of tools developed by the same D&A team. Which also resulted in better handoff which when applied to the designs of for many other applications also.

Brand Coherence

Designed the tool with all the required brand guideline which ensures that your brand's visual language is consistently applied across all digital touchpoints, promoting a strong and coherent brand presence.

Making things accessible

I designed the entire application considering the basic accessibility checks and made sure it is accessible across all user groups by checking things like, color contrasts, headings structures and labels, form field labels, proper links and buttons, tooltips, indicating required fields etc.