Transforming a hidden feature into a discoverable asset for a B2B startup.
I was a Product Design Intern at Pendo, a rapidly-growing startup offering a suite of tools that help businesses understand what drives their success. One of Pendo's key products is Guides, which businesses can deploy to fulfill a number of purposes - onboarding new users, announcing new features, and communicating important updates to their product. During my internship...
I explored ways to reduce customer frustrations.
I focused on increasing customer awareness of promising new features.
I immersed myself in every part of the design process.
I participated in research sessions, collaborated with designers and developers, and produced deliverables in Figma and Whimsical.
I boosted conversions for a new feature by 125%.
I presented my work to the company, and saw my ideas making a positive impact in the product.
Background
Pendo had just launched Repeat Guide Display (RGD), a new feature that allowed administrators to set guides to repeat a specific number of times before expiring based on user behavior. This addressed a critical pain point: administrators feared "spamming" users with repetitive guides and lacked insight into which guides actually drove results for their businesses.
However, a significant usability gap emerged post-launch. The Guide Details dashboard provided no visibility into whether RGD was actually activated for any given guide. The Activation card, the primary location for monitoring guide performance, remained unchanged, leaving administrators blind to this new activation method. Pendo’s investment in this powerful new feature was undermined by poor discoverability, leading to low user adoption.
My role was to identify and design a way to showcase the new feature in the Activation card.
Design Process
Given that RGD was already live in production, I had to work within tight technical and time constraints. The solution needed to leverage existing UI components and patterns to minimize development effort and avoid disrupting established workflows. It also needed to be implementable within a 2-week sprint cycle.
First Iteration
Working with the product manager, I first explored a simple solution: embedding RGD details under the existing “How does this guide activate?” heading.
However, this option had issues with scalability - when guides used 3 or more activation types, the resulting sentences were complex and hard to understand at-a-glance.
Second Iteration
I then explored reorganizing the information in the bottom half of the Activation card, using icons and dedicated fields for the RGD details.
While this gave RGD visual prominence in the card, usability testing showed that users preferred the familiar, sentence-based explanations.
Through cross-functional feedback sessions, I recognized the need for a middle-ground solution. The design needed to maintain the sentence structure while using strategic visual cues to highlight the new activation method. I decided to zoom out and evaluate the Activation card as a whole, exploring ways to add RGD while improving visual symmetry with the rest of the dashboard.
Solution
The final design directly solved the gap in visibility that left administrators blind to the status of Repeat Guide Display.
By adding a separate text structure in the bottom half of the card, users can now immediately identify whether RGD is active and understand how it’s configured without guessing or hunting through the guide’s settings.
Additionally, the top half of the card has been repurposed to include icons corresponding to each active Activation type, rather than one icon for every scenario. These icons were already used in other areas of the Pendo ecosystem, so adding them here created more synergy with the rest of the product. Also, the “How does this guide activate?” section was reworked to have a more cohesive and natural explanation that incorporates RGD when it's active.
This layered approach gives RGD the place it deserves in the dashboard, and allows administrators to confidently audit their guide strategies at-a-glance.
Impact
Through close collaboration with the product and engineering teams, I delivered this solution from concept to production in just a few weeks.
Two months post-launch, the design team conducted a funnel analysis measuring user engagement with Repeat Guide Display from the dashboard. They saw a 125% increase in RGD usage from the new Activation card.
This dramatic uptick directly addressed the original challenge I faced with this project: low adoption of a high-value feature due to poor discovery.
Lessons Learned
My time at Pendo was such an enlightening experience, especially as a young designer. Here are some of my takeaways:
Embrace constraints.
One of my biggest takeaways was that embracing constraints early, rather than fighting them, can lead to more innovative solutions. Navigating a short timeline and technical limitations led me to explore a variety of approaches to the problem at hand.
Feedback is essential.
Pendo’s weekly design huddles proved essential to my success. Having other designers and PMs critique my designs and challenge my assumptions taught me the value of diverse perspectives in any project. Even when the feedback was brutally honest, opening myself up to it ultimately pushed me to explore my successful solutions.
Stay organized.
By keeping my Figma files organized and tracking meetings and iterations in my Notion workspace, I was able to speed up communication, deliver an airtight presentation of my work, and preserve my sanity.
