Teams were making design decisions based on what felt right. Designer instinct, stakeholder preference, best guesses. There was no way to know if a flow actually worked before it went to engineering.
I owned the product: scope and feature prioritization, specification, prototyping the vision for the development team, and sign-off before anything shipped. Team shared with Indigo Studio: 7 developers, 2 senior architects, 1 visual designer. Discovery built on prior UX research expertise and competitive analysis: existing tools relied on user panels that enterprise customers couldn't use for private, internal work. I validated prototypes with internal users and Indigo Studio customers, a captive audience already invested in the workflow.
Proper usability testing required scheduling, facilitators, and budget that most teams didn't have. So it just didn't happen. Validation was a luxury, not a practice. Everyone knew it.
The original goal was video session replay. But video requires a one-time setup, is opt-in, and produces too much data to process when you have dozens of recordings. The strategic call was to lean into static reports instead: funnel metrics and timeline-based click maps that let moderators find problem areas by scanning visualizations rather than watching footage. No viewing overhead, no setup friction. Immediate signal.
An upload-based testing flow: teams could test any existing app screen without building a native prototype first, opening up research to teams who'd never done it before.
