Transforming an Engineering-Led Company Into a Design-Led One
Two engagements. One company. The story of how research-first design practice was built from the ground up at Balfour — and what it took to earn the organization's trust in the process.
Building the Industry's First Research-Driven Yearbook Platform
How I led the full-lifecycle design and research program for Encore — a first-in-class mobile yearbook publishing product — in a market dominated by four legacy players and a company that had never shipped a UX-led product before.
A zero-sum market where the only differentiator left was experience
Yearbook publishing is a market dominated by four major companies where print quality, speed, and price had become commodities. Retention and purchase decisions were no longer being won on production capability — they were being lost on software frustration. The existing tools were complex, deeply difficult for first-time users, and modeled on the flexibility of Photoshop rather than the needs of a parent building an elementary school yearbook.
Balfour had an opportunity to be first. No competitor had ever built a yearbook publishing platform from a foundation of user research. Encore was that bet — a mobile-first, research-driven product designed to work for the full range of users, from after-school coordinators to college editors to sales reps closing deals on a tablet.
This wasn't a redesign project. It was a market positioning play disguised as a product — and the only way to win was to out-research and out-empathize four companies that had never prioritized either.
Build the practice, then build the product
When I joined Balfour as their first UX designer, there was no research practice, no design system, no UX integration into the product roadmap, and no organizational trust in design as a strategic function. My job was to change all of that — and ship Encore while doing it.
I scaled the team from 1 to 9, building a cross-functional group of designers, researchers, content strategists, information architects, and developers. I implemented a User Centered Design operating model using Scrum and Design Sprints, which quadrupled the team's project capacity and enabled us to become a cross-divisional resource across 12+ projects simultaneously.
I also built the company's first internal research cycle, integrating it directly into the product roadmap and release plan — establishing research as a standard part of delivery, not an optional add-on. To scale testing capacity without scaling cost, I leveraged Balfour's regional sales training network as a built-in research panel — increasing testing reach 5x while reducing research costs by over 60% year-over-year.
Generative first, evaluative throughout
Before a single wireframe was drawn, we went to market. We audited competitor strengths and weaknesses, built a product priority framework from that analysis, and ran generative research with both the product team and end users to understand what the market needed — not what sales assumed it needed.
The research ran in two continuous streams across the full product lifecycle.
The first UX-led product in the industry's history
Encore launched as the yearbook industry's first platform built from a foundation of user research rather than sales team requirements. It was designed to work for the full range of market users — from first-time coordinators to experienced college editors — and architected to extend into mobile and beyond as the student market matured.
The design system was built for scale from day one: structured to translate across multiple international development teams, with consistent patterns that could absorb new features without fracturing the user experience. Voice and tone, information architecture, and brand-level design standards were documented and maintained across all divisional applications — establishing a foundation that the organization continues to build on.
Being able to deliver a product of this research depth was the direct result of two years of organizational evangelism — between myself and the Director of Engineering. We built the company's trust in UX together, turning a function that had been ignored into one that defined the product vision in a market flooded with sales-led roadmap decisions.
A design practice that outlasted the product launch
The measurable product results were strong. But the more significant outcome was organizational: Balfour shipped its first-ever UX-led product, established a research practice that became a permanent part of its delivery model, and built a cross-divisional design team that became a company-wide resource.
Three obstacles that required executive-level thinking to navigate
Delivering Maximum Impact Inside a Two-Month Window
How I led a full-interface redesign of Balfour's 15-year-old core product — under severe time and resource constraints — without compromising the research foundation or the user outcomes that made the work worth doing.
A 15-year-old product keeping pace with four competitors — or losing the race
The majority of Balfour's users were on a legacy Java system that hadn't been meaningfully updated in over a decade. A full code refresh wasn't possible — the development team was focused on Encore and the next generation of products. But the business couldn't afford to lose enterprise accounts at large schools and universities to competitors who were investing in modernization.
The ask was clear and constrained: produce as much user-facing improvement as possible, within two months, using a single shared developer. Primary user pain points had already been surfaced through concurrent research on adjacent products — confusing icon systems, broken content architecture, a dysfunctional page management workflow, and insufficient teacher oversight tools.
Constrained delivery projects reveal what a design org is actually made of. The team structure, the research infrastructure, and the decision-making model we had built over two years at Balfour were exactly what made this possible.
Four user problems. One developer. Eight weeks.
The scope was defined by four primary user concerns that had emerged from existing research — concerns significant enough to drive churn if left unaddressed, but targeted enough that a disciplined team could close them in a single delivery cycle.
Prior research as an accelerant, not a shortcut
What made this engagement executable in two months wasn't cutting corners on research — it was that we had already done the foundational work. Concurrent studies running across other Balfour products had surfaced overlapping insights about user mental models, navigation patterns, and core workflow failures. That prior investment compressed the discovery phase from weeks to days.
We ran a focused three-day design sprint to move from existing insights to a scoped proposal. The sprint included discovery synthesis, ideation against the four target problem areas, and a prioritized recommendation to the product manager — all within the first week. This is what years of building a research-first culture enables: the ability to move with evidence at sprint speed.
Constraint as a forcing function for design clarity
The two-month window forced the team to make fast, well-evidenced decisions and resist scope expansion. Every design choice was tied to one of the four scoped user problems — if a proposed addition couldn't be traced back to a research finding, it didn't make the release.
The visual design also served a secondary strategic purpose: aligning the legacy product's design language with Encore's emerging system. By beginning to orient users toward the new visual paradigm, we reduced the cognitive distance they would eventually have to cross when migrating to the next-generation platform — effectively making this redesign a user onboarding investment as much as a product improvement.
Designs were delivered to the project team on time and within the target budget. The evaluative research window that followed surfaced lingering concerns that were folded directly into the backlog for the successor product — ensuring none of the insight generated under deadline pressure was lost.
On time, on budget — and building the foundation for what came next
The redesign was delivered within the two-month window, addressing all four scoped user problems and maintaining the design system coherence established through Encore. No scope was dropped. No deadline was missed.
The broader legacy of this engagement was organizational: it demonstrated that a well-structured UX team with a research foundation can absorb constrained timelines without abandoning the rigor that makes design trustworthy. Short turnarounds don't have to mean shortcuts — they require a team that has already done the upstream work.