Redesigning Attest's core product flow — and building the team to own it.

Attest was building traction as a B2B consumer research platform when design debt caught up with its core product. The survvey creation flow had been extended month by month – each new capability had been grafted on, and the result was a flow that was disjointed and difficult to learn.

I joined as a freelance Product Design Lead with two mandates: rebuild the survey creation experience from the research up, and build the design function from scratch alongside it. Over six months I hired three designers, established working processes, and delivered a redesigned core flow — one that could accommodate new capabilities far more gracefully.

3 Designers hired
and onboarded

6 mo Freelance
engagement

Understanding the problem.

I started with data. Session recordings from FullStory and activity data from Mixpanel showed a friction point just as people started to create a survey. Out top users were markting (49%) and founders (28%) – people without deep fluency in survey methodology or the tooling itself.

However the most revealing insight didn't come from the analytics at all. It came from people's own survey drafts — I sourced these from clients directly. What emerged was a picture of three genuinely different cognitive approaches to the same task.

Anatomy of a typical survey draft — Mapping how people actually draft surveys revealed three distinct mental models.

Common survey draft patterns — The variety of draft patterns in the system — each a window into a different way of thinking about the task.

That shifted the design question entirely. This wasn't a UI cleanup problem — it was a mental model problem. How do you design a single interface that works for people who are conceptualising the same task in fundamentally different ways?

Designing for different mental models.

I prototyped in Origami Studio — Facebook's recently released interaction design tool. The survey creation flow was complex and multimodal enough that static screens simply couldn't test it — users needed to actually move through the states, switch between modes, and experience the branching logic responding to their input.

Attest routing view wireframe — The Route view — each question could trigger a different path based on the respondent's answer, all configurable within a single diagram. Managing logic of this complexity made high-fidelity prototyping a necessity, not a choice.

Prototype built in Origami Studio — high enough fidelity to test conditional routing with real users. The outcome was a flexible interface flow that accommodated different mental models. Users could switch between two views depending on whether they wanted to build structurally or linearly.

Attest survey creation flow redesign — The redesigned survey creation flow — questions, answer logic, audience targeting, and conditional routing, reconsidered as a coherent whole.

The redesign gave the product team something they hadn't had before: a core flow they could build on rather than around. New features could be introduced without structural compromise, and the design function I'd built alongside the work meant there was now a team in place to own that standard going forward.