CAPData · Enterprise SaaS
Simplifying Complex Enterprise Purchasing
Restructuring one of CAPData's most business-critical workflows to make complex purchasing clearer, more discoverable, and scalable for CAPData 3.0.
Role
Product Designer (sole designer)
Timeline
Dec 2025 – Jun 2026
Platform
Enterprise SaaS Desktop + Mobile
Collaboration
Product Manager · Developers · Sales · Internal Stakeholders
Problem
The purchase experience had evolved organically over years and no longer reflected how customers understood or purchased CAP's products—making it difficult to navigate, compare, and buy with confidence.
Background
An engineering-first workflow in a customer-first world
CAPData is CAP Index's enterprise SaaS platform used to purchase and manage access to risk intelligence products and services. As part of CAPData 3.0, I was given full ownership of redesigning its end-to-end purchase experience.
Originally built from an engineering-first perspective, the purchase workflow was difficult to navigate, product relationships were unclear, and key purchasing decisions lacked context. Limited and poorly contextualized entry points made relevant products easy to overlook.
Goal & Outcome
How might I help customers discover, understand, and purchase CAP products with confidence?
Redesign the end-to-end purchase experience to make complex purchasing clearer and more discoverable—while creating a scalable foundation for CAPData's evolving product ecosystem.
Design Outcome
—
Introduced a Feature Breakdown experience to improve product understanding.
—
Expanded contextual purchase entry points across the platform.
—
Made complex site purchasing states visible before checkout.
—
Created a scalable structure that accommodated a new product mid-project.
See how the experience came together below ↓
Approach
Structure first, interface second
Before exploring solutions, I mapped how the existing purchase experience worked across all purchasing scenarios—new products, report repurchases, and credit-based purchases. Visualizing the system exposed inconsistent decision points, hidden dependencies, and simplification opportunities before I touched the interface.
I paired this with conversations across product, engineering, sales, and stakeholders—clarifying business rules and surfacing opportunities beyond the original brief, including new ways to help customers discover products they might otherwise overlook.
Three Principles
The biggest opportunity was restructuring the experience around how customers evaluate and purchase products—not just modernizing the visual design.
01
Clarify Product Relationships
Make products, plans, features, and purchasing implications easier to understand and compare.
02
Improve Discoverability
Surface relevant products contextually instead of expecting customers to know where purchasing begins.
03
Design for Scalability
Create a structure that can accommodate new products and scenarios without requiring a complete redesign.
Key Design Decisions
Where principles met practice
With the strategy defined, I translated these principles into a series of design decisions that addressed the biggest points of friction across the purchase journey. The following decisions highlight how I balanced customer clarity, complex business requirements, and scalability throughout the redesign.
Goal 1
Helping Customers Understand What They're Purchasing
Newer customers could enter CAPData without prior sales guidance, yet the experience gave them little help distinguishing products, comparing plans, or understanding feature value. I focused on making the flow informative enough for confident in-product decisions.
Decision 01 · Clarifying Products & Plans
Challenge
Plan comparisons relied on quantities and short descriptions, making it difficult to understand what each plan actually included.
Solution
I reorganized the plan hierarchy and redesigned the cards to surface specific features per plan, making differences easier to scan and compare.
Before
After
Decision 02 · Feature Breakdown
Challenge
Feature names and short tooltips weren't enough for unfamiliar customers to understand what they were paying for.
Solution
I introduced a Feature Breakdown that explains each feature with richer descriptions and supporting imagery—letting customers explore value without leaving the purchase flow.
Before
After
Decision 03 · Designing for Global Purchases
Challenge
Customers purchasing sites across multiple countries previously needed separate orders. CAPData 3.0 introduced multi-country purchasing, but one plan tier still needed to apply across all selected sites.
Solution
I designed a guided multi-country flow that groups sites by country and clearly shows how the selected plan, pricing, and features translate across regions—keeping the purchase in one cohesive order.
Final UI — country grouping, plan differences, and contextual guidance
Exploring the Workflow
Because multi-country purchasing was a new capability, I explored a few workflow iterations with product and developers—making country-specific differences and system constraints understandable without adding unnecessary complexity.
2–3 iteration snapshots with short captions explaining direction changes
Product Thinking
Rather than expecting customers to rely on sales for clarification, I designed education directly into the purchase flow—approachable for first-time customers while preserving speed for experienced users.
Goal 2
Designing for Complex Purchasing Workflows
CAPData needed to support more than a standard checkout. Customers arrived with different account states, purchasing histories, and site portfolios. I focused on making these complex scenarios understandable without disrupting workflows experienced customers already relied on.
Decision 01 · Clarifying Site Status
Challenge
Imported batches could contain both new and existing sites, but the interface gave users little visibility into which sites were new purchases, already owned, or being updated.
Solution
I redesigned the site list to make each site's status explicit within the workflow, helping customers understand what would happen to every location before moving forward.
Before
Site list — new, existing, and updating states — Before
After
Site list — new, existing, and updating states — After
Decision 02 · Improving Purchase Transparency
Challenge
The existing import summary made it difficult to tell which sites would incur charges, remain unchanged, or couldn't be modified because of their current plan.
Solution
I redesigned the Import Summary to group sites by status and surface billing and plan constraints before purchase—giving customers a clearer review of what would happen next.
Before
Import Summary — site groups, no-charge states, updates, and plan constraints — Before
After
Import Summary — site groups, no-charge states, updates, and plan constraints — After
Decision 03 · Expanding Purchase Entry Points
Challenge
Limited purchase entry points meant customers—especially newer ones—could overlook relevant products while moving through CAPData.
Solution
I introduced contextual purchase entry points across the platform. When CrimeStrata (a new product) was added mid-project, it integrated into the new structure without requiring a major workflow redesign.
Platform map — old entry points vs. expanded contextual entry points
Scalability in Practice
When CrimeStrata was introduced midway through the project, it integrated into the redesigned purchasing structure without requiring a major workflow redesign— validating the architecture's scalability.
CrimeStrata integrated into the redesigned purchasing structure
Designing Across Devices
The purchase experience also needed to remain clear and usable across smaller screens. I translated the redesigned workflows to responsive layouts while preserving the same information hierarchy, purchasing logic, and decision-making context across desktop and mobile.
Rather than simply shrinking the desktop experience, layouts and interactions were adapted to prioritize the information users needed at each step while maintaining consistency across devices.
Desktop and mobile versions of the same purchase screen shown side by side
Mobile — product selection
Mobile — plan comparison
Mobile — feature breakdown
Mobile — order review
Collaboration & Delivery
Design doesn't end at handoff
Many improvements changed more than the interface—they introduced new workflows and required backend support. I worked closely with product managers and developers to validate feasibility, resolve edge cases, and advocate for UX improvements when they required additional development effort.
Cross-functional collaboration diagram — Design ↔ Product ↔ Engineering, with Sales and stakeholders feeding context
Tradeoff
Some improvements required additional engineering investment, but we chose to support them because the purchase flow directly affects how customers discover, understand, and buy products.
Interactive Prototyping
Static mockups couldn't fully communicate a workflow with multiple branches and account states. I built interactive prototypes so product, developers, and stakeholders could experience the flow before implementation and align on intended behavior.
Interactive prototype walkthrough — representative purchase scenario with multiple branches
QA & Refinement
I stayed involved throughout development—reviewing implementations with engineers and refining responsive behavior, interactions, workflow logic, and edge cases to keep the built experience aligned with design intent.
Design vs. implementation QA — interaction behavior, workflow logic, responsive states, component consistency
Outcome
A foundation built to scale
CAPData 3.0 had not launched before my departure, so post-launch behavioral metrics were not yet available. The purchase experience was fully designed, prototyped, QA'd, and largely implemented.
The redesign established a clearer, more scalable purchasing foundation: customers could better understand products, navigate complex site states, discover purchasing opportunities contextually, and complete multi-country purchases in a single cohesive flow.
Final polished desktop + responsive mobile experience
What I Would Measure After Launch
Intended future success measures—not claimed outcomes.
01
Purchase completion rate
02
Contextual entry point usage
03
Feature discovery in purchase flow
04
Purchasing-related support volume
05
Drop-off by purchasing scenario
Reflection
This project strengthened my ability to own a complex enterprise workflow from strategy through implementation.
It reinforced that simplifying enterprise software doesn't mean removing complexity—it means structuring that complexity so customers can understand it, act confidently, and scale with the product.
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