Driving adoption and engagement for enterprise applications

Countless apps are used daily, yet most aren’t built for individuals.

Whatfix helps individuals adapt and engage with applications by simplifying software guidance, analytics, and experience simulations.

Image- Whatfix dashboard

My Journey

At Whatfix, I work across two tribes, the DAP Discovery pod, empowering content authors to design and customize widgets that improve end-user onboarding, adoption, and engagement; and the AI Labs pod, driving the 0-to-1 scaling of AI Saas products. I also contributed to the mobile DAP pod as well

Whatfix Personas

Our Users

Whatfix serves three key personas, both directly and indirectly, each with unique goals and interactions with the platform:

  • End Users - The employees or customers who engage with enterprise content within their organization’s application

  • Admins & Managers - Configure, monitor, and maintain platform performance and adoption.

  • Learning & Development Authors / Instructional Designers - Create and manage in-app learning content and experiences.

The Signals

Context

Self help & Tasklist are overlay widgets on the base application that act as a go to place for end users to discover, interact and consume various content types for better adoption and understanding of their application

But at the end of Q4 of 2024, there was a significant dip in engagement & open rate for the end user panel to as low as 20.8% for even higher performing ENTs

Problem Tickets

Product Board tickets showcasing customer concerns

Data showing drop in open rates

What was happening ?

Customers particularly admins and content authors struggled to customize the panel to align with their base applications.

As a result, the widget appeared disconnected from the base application, reducing brand consistency and user trust.

Understanding the problem

Analyzing existing AC codes, Technical configs and CSS

Around 80% of widget customization and styling relied on AC code, technical configurations, or CSS, implemented by solution or sales engineers based on individual customer needs.

This resulted in increased support tickets by 22% on average, inconsistent experiences across customers and a lack of unified product vision

Customizations implemented across 1,200+ enterprise accounts included:

  • Styling adjustments for corner radius, colors, spacing, fonts, headers, FAB icons, and description text on the widget.


  • Widget orientation tailored to end-user requirements.


  • FAB size modifications based on customer preferences.


  • Widget placement (latching) to specific sections within applications for contextual relevance.

Competitors

Competitive Solutions

Users voice - feedback on dashboard from content authors & admins

  • Lack of flexibility to custom the widget based on the customer needs


  • Redundant effort when customizing two similar widgets within the same dashboard, leading to inefficiencies.


  • Inconsistent customization options between Self and Task lists create higher cognitive load and a steeper learning curve for content authors.


  • There is no easy, no-code way for customers to configure or personalize the widget UI, increasing dependency on Whatfix support.

Users voice - feedback from end users

  • The end-user experience is falling short, leading to confusion, frustration, and inefficiency for both customers and partners.


  • The default Whatfix UI is perceived as complex, outdated, and unintuitive, lacking modern design quality and polish.


  • Product updates often remove previously supported features, disrupting seamless migration and content updates for customers

Existing product experience

Existing product experience

AC code

AC code example

Understanding competitor solutions

  • Out-of-the-box customisation functionalities, enabling content authors to configure and deploy independently


  • Have minimal reliance on product support.


  • 10/12 competitors have a unified experience of their help and tasks widgets


  • Provided 3rd party and in-house chat/bot integrations

Voice of customers

Voice of customers

Voice of end users

Voice of end users

Heuristic analysis of existing experiences

  • Overwhelming configurations with excessive cognitive load making users struggle to locate the right control or understand its impact


  • Inconsistent visual and interaction patterns across dashboard configurations and end-user widget

  • Lack of consistency & hierarchy along with dense layouts thereby increasing scanning time and the likelihood of errors.

  • Limited personalisation for diverse end-user contexts.

Inferences

Based on data, heuristics, competitive analysis and user feedback we can narrow down the insights to three essential items that would ensure an enhanced customer expereince

Design Strategy & Solution

While I’d love to share how these challenges evolved into a scalable design strategy, the work is protected under NDA, preventing me from showcasing detailed visuals or artifacts publicly. What I can share is that the journey involved close collaboration between product, engineering, and design to build an adaptive system that balanced flexibility with consistency.

I’d be glad to walk you through the process and impact in a private conversation or over coffee.