From Confusion to Clarity: Redesigning a Review Dashboard to Drive Action
Overview
Vendasta’s white-label SaaS solution helps small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) manage and respond to online reviews. However, user feedback and behavioral data revealed a critical issue: new users abandoned the tool before completing their first review response, feeling overwhelmed and uncertain where to start. One partner summed it up clearly:
My customers can’t figure out what this product is for. They check it out once, feel overwhelmed, and never come back.
The goal: redesign the dashboard to clarify the product’s value, guide users to action, and increase engagement with its most important task — responding to reviews.
The Challenge
The original dashboard was cluttered with outdated visual design and lacked a clear entry point into the review response workflow. It offered no clear calls-to-action (CTAs), no guidance, and had poor mobile optimization, frustrating users, especially SMBs who rely on managing reviews on the go. Task completion rates were low, and many users clicked aimlessly, unable to navigate the process, ultimately abandoning the task. To validate these issues, I leveraged a mix of usability testing, user feedback from support tickets, and behavioural analytics, all of which helped identify the core pain points.
❗ Key Pain Points:
- Overwhelming information
- No clear next steps or CTAs
- Poor mobile usability
- Outdated visual design
- High drop-off rates during onboarding
Solution
To address these challenges I introduced clear, purposeful CTAs and restructured the dashboard layout to focus users' paths. By simplifying information, prioritizing key actions, and optimizing for mobile, I reduced confusion, enabled faster responses, and improved overall task completion rates.
🎯 Goals
- Guide User Actions: Introduce clear, purpose-driven CTAs that lead users directly into the review response workflow — making the process fast, intuitive, and rewarding.
- Reduce Cognitive Load: Highlight only the most relevant information by simplifying the UI and removing unnecessary distractions.
- Ensure Mobile Usability: Design a fully responsive experience that supports SMB users working in fast-paced, real-world environments like retail shops or cafés.
- Improve Visual Hierarchy: Use layout principles like typography, whitespace, and color to improve scanability and guide the user naturally through their tasks.
Results & Impact
The dashboard redesign successfully turned a high-friction, low-engagement experience into a streamlined, action-oriented workflow that aligned with SMB users’ real-world needs. By grounding design decisions in behavioral data and feedback, I increased usability, clarity, and most importantly, helped users get real value from the product.
📈 Task Completion Up 70%: More users reached and completed the core review response workflow
🔻 Click Path Reduced: From 12–17 exploratory clicks to 1–3 guided actions
✅ Positive User Feedback: Maze testing confirmed improved clarity and usability, with one user sharing: "This looks great! I actually get what I’m looking at and know what to do next.”
Next Steps
To continue improving the dashboard experience, I partnered with the analytics team to implement tracking across the new dashboard. Future iterations will be informed by this data, helping us identify drop-off points, optimize user flows, and refine the dashboard’s effectiveness over time.
