The Redesign Overview
This project started with a constraint most designers would have dreaded: four months, full feature parity, no additions, no removals. The ask was to migrate Arctic Wolf's IR Planner out of a legacy standalone app and into their Unified Portal.
What I want to walk you through today isn't just what we built — it's the decisions we made, the things we deliberately chose not to build, and what shipping under real constraints taught me about design leadership.
The outcome: a 22% usability improvement measured by SUS scores, plus 41% increase in customer satisfaction and 36% growth in feature adoption post-launch. I'll come back to how we measured those, but I want to earn those numbers first by showing you the decisions behind them.
A broken, fragmented flow
The core problem was architectural. Arctic Wolf's IR Planner lived on a completely separate, legacy portal. Customers who used the Unified Portal every day had to fully context-switch — leave the platform, navigate to a different app, log in again — just to access their incident readiness information.
This created two problems simultaneously. From a user perspective: broken flow, inconsistent design patterns, no continuity. From a business perspective: Arctic Wolf was maintaining two separate infrastructures with two separate codebases.
The survey validated what we already suspected — 47% of customers had their IR plans insufficiently filled out. Fragmentation and friction were a big part of why.
Design as a forcing function
Three constraints defined the entire project. First: lift-and-shift. Full feature parity, nothing added, nothing removed. Any new scope was a hard no — and this constraint was the most important design forcing function we had.
Second: four months. Design, build, QA, and launch. Not a lot of runway.
Third: a new development team based in India. We'd never worked together. Everything had to be async-first — crystal clear specs, tight documentation, deliberate communication rhythms.
These weren't obstacles. They were the frame that made every decision sharper.
Less overwhelming than Excel
Six months before the project kicked off, the team ran a survey of 57 customers. Only 47% had their IR plans sufficiently filled out. 25% had barely started.
Here's the important nuance: when we dug into the interviews, the barrier wasn't time or resources — it was friction. Customers understood why the tool mattered. The ones who finished explicitly said they did it so their employees would know what to do in a breach. The motivation was there. The experience was getting in the way.
The five customer interviews also revealed something useful about the baseline — before Arctic Wolf, customers were working from Excel spreadsheets, Word docs, and handwritten plans. They described our IR Planner as 'less overwhelming.' That's our bar. Less overwhelming than an Excel template. That told us simplicity and structure were the priority — not feature richness.