One weekend redesign turned into a new company-wide initiative.

Moz Pro is Moz’s flagship SEO suite. At the time, our North Star was user lifecycle and journey, so we tracked “Aha!” moments. These were moments when a user stops, looks at what’s in front of them, and thinks “okay, this is extremely helpful!”

We knew what a lot of our “Aha!” moments were, but they were scattered across six different tools and buried a few clicks deep, and a free trial is a short window to stumble into them by accident.

Domain Overview pulled them into one page, early in the journey. It also closed a competitor-parity gap that Ahrefs and SEMrush had already filled.

Partnering with Rebecca, our UX Research & Strategy Lead, we laid out how we’d actually prove this page was worth building, in three layers.

• Layer 1: get the full list of “Aha!” moments, map which ones Domain Overview would trigger, and tie that to projected vesting.
• Layer 2: find how many users used the free Domain Analysis tool and how often, to project in-app engagement.
• Layer 3: survey paying users who were still using our free tool, to understand why they weren’t just using Moz Pro, and pair that with interview data on what they’d want on the page.

The demand already existed, we could measure it, and every data point on the page was something we already had. This gave us a low-risk, high-impact case.

Documenting a proper game plan is standard practice for me as it outlines the steps that will be taken and timeframes for those steps. Once approved, it becomes a working agreement and, if kept up to date, it also allows everyone to know where one is at with their project, and makes a handoff much easier when necessary.

My plan was to transition the design work to our Senior Designer, so I knew this would come in handy.

The concept was well received internally, but now we had one genuinely modern, well-organized screen, sitting inside a product where every other screen still looked 10 years old.

Instead of feeling like progress, it made the rest of Moz Pro look broken by comparison, and we had no plans on fixing that.

Nobody had disagreed that our patterns were dated, but an argument about design debt stays abstract until it’s two screens side by side. This gave me the fuel for my argument that a patch-it-as-we-go strategy had an expiration date, and needed to change.

This was not a small ask. In fact, it was such a big ask (and process) that it warranted its own entire case study. I highly recommend checking it out.

Spoiler alert — I put together a pitch and we got the approval for a complete UI/UX overhaul, then scheduled Domain Overview to be the first release with this new style.

Read the Moz 2.0 case study

Rather than starting from scratch, the team and I used my concept as the starting point and built out final mockups from there.

I remained more hands-on with the design side of things here while my team gathered internal feedback and adjusted.

Rebecca reviewed open questions with internal stakeholders and SMEs, planned the on-page education for first-time users, scoped a “get started” visual with our Visual Design partner, worked out the loading, empty and error states, and wrote the first pass of copy.

From there Product led the MVP user stories, and Dev scoped the build, surfacing edge cases and locking the designs down with us before a full group review.

We released Domain Overview to a closed group of users for a few weeks, analyzed the feedback and tracking data against our original hypotheses, made some tweaks, and then rolled it out to everyone.

Full width, responsive, updated style. This was the first page in Moz Pro to ship this way and it was very exciting.

If you’re curious about the specifics, I have a separate case study on making bar charts accessible

Domain Overview quickly became the top performing research page in the app, getting around 2x the usage over the others. It also increased traffic to the other research pages within Moz Pro, as this eased them into those other pages.

We saw a 9% increase in vesting from Free Trialers who actively engaged* with Domain Overview. It was short of our 20% goal, however, Domain Overview wasn’t the only initiative to increase vesting, so 9% was a great start.

Churn did decrease over the next 18 months, however, this was likely due to several initiatives, including the Moz 2.0 redesign which was kicked off because of Domain Overview.

*“Actively engaged” means they used it 3 or more times, and totalling over 5 minutes on the page.