Visual Design
About the project
Founding Product Designer | 0→1 SaaS product | Bootstrapped
Client: Dan Morris of TimeUnbarred
When: June 2022- July 2023
Team: Mia Campbell-Foulkes - Product Designer
OneIt - Developers
Situation
TimeUnbarred is a preventative SaaS platform built to protect small subcontractors from losing contractual rights due to missed timebar deadlines buried in complex construction contracts. Founded by a civil construction lawyer, the mission was clear: make legal compliance operational and accessible, not reactive and expensive.
This case study covers Phase 1: stabilising and restructuring the MVP for investor demo within a two week window.
The founder had deep domain expertise and strong conviction. The product, however, was unstable.
Multiple pathways returned errors. The delay notice form was a static, non responsive page that often required manual legal review. Feature ideas were being added continuously. A live investor demo was scheduled within weeks.
There were no analytics, no established user base, and limited access to real customers.
If the product failed at demo, the mission stalled.
Task
Deliver a stable, demo ready MVP centred around one fully functional delay notice workflow.
Research
With no formal research pipeline, usability testing became product investigation. I manually stress tested every pathway, logged error states, mapped dead ends, and audited legal logic with the founder. Internal workshops unpacked how timebars actually functioned in real world contracts and where subcontractors typically failed.
Insights & Initial Solutions
Three patterns emerged:
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Broken pathways were undermining trust immediately.
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Legal complexity was mirrored in the interface, increasing cognitive load.
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Scope expansion threatened stability and focus.
The initial solution was not adding features. It was containment. Narrow the MVP to one critical workflow and make it work flawlessly.
Reception & Challenges
Founder ambition and tight timelines required constant triage. Some edge case workflows remained unresolved and were conditionally routed to manual review. With only two weeks before demo, decisions prioritised completion and stability over polish.
Insights & Initial Solutions
Research
Action
Users
Working as a contractor, it was super important to quickly understand who the problems were affecting. The above problems implied that we were not just creating solutions for the staff but also for the managers who were overseeing this work.
Solutions for both ‘users-facing’ and ‘admin-facing’ were needed.
Problem 1
There was no way to track output and productivity of offshore staff.
Both from an internal agency (Bud Social) perspective and an external customer perspective, it was important to have a log of all the citations that were being created daily and any older citations that needed attention. We also needed a system that the agency could use to update their clients with all the work that they were doing.
Insights and Initial Solutions
The low-fi wireframe below shows the skeleton of an initial solution. A live table that showed newest customers, most recent citation submissions and citations that required attention - be it to remove, update or investigate the backlinks/ permalinks.
This dashboard from an admin view could also show who the citations were created by and when.
Reception, changes and Challenges
Although the dashboard was a good start, additional details needed to be presented. This led us to create separate citation and customer tables. This meant that the ‘home’ dashboard became a simplified snapshot with: ‘recently updated citations’ and ‘recent citation activity’, providing a high-level view of customers' growth.
Problem 2
Citation maintenance was very time-consuming and difficult.
Citation maintenance was very time-consuming and difficult. They were faced with problems such as: not knowing if the backlinks were still active, if the providers (directories) were still active, if there were 404 issues or permalinks missing.
Insights and Initial Solutions
Part of this solution was to work with the back-end development team to understand what could be checked automatically and then to create a dashboard that presents these checks.
The wireframe sketches show the citations grouped into both valid and invalid and then present relevant information, such as when it was last checked, any issues that needed to be corrected and whether it had been indexed yet. Downloading full reports and sorting by columns were also features of these tables, that came during the mock-up stage.
Changes and Challenges
As this was a fairly technical and involved aspect to the project, I did need a lot of guidance in what was possible. The tools, structures and API’s that were specific to pulling citation data were aspects that only backend devs would know, so it was very much a case of ‘you don’t know, what you don’t know’ for me. Luckily for me, the fields were provided - it was just a case of stylising and presenting the information clearly.
Problem 3
It was difficult and confusing for new employees to create citations.
Citations for SEO purposes are not so much about quality but rather high quantity. Finding websites to host details about their clients is a very repetitive but time-consuming process.
For this reason, this work was outsourced to low-level data entry workers. For new workers, the concept of creating a citation from scratch and remembering what information was needed for each citation was hard to grasp from the outset. To reduce the amount of time it would take to train these staff we needed to propose a solution that did a lot of hand-holding.
Insights & Initial Solutions for Problem 1
We needed to find a user-friendly way to guide and teach low-level data entry clerks through the process of creating a citation for the client. During this process, they would also use the majority of the same customer information for each provider host, so a library of resources would also be beneficial.
Part of this step-by-step system also included asset libraries for customers that already existed. If the customer had not yet been created, there was an opportunity to input that content (such as images, descriptions, addresses, phone numbers etc) to copy and paste to future citations and confirm the existing information was still valid and correct. This ensured that all information had one localised place to save time and avoid human error.
Challenges
This guide was not something that I was able to truly nut out with the director, so the wireframing stage was basically non-existent as I created it with a high-fi mock up assets from the Tailwind library and reworked it on the fly.
Result
Conclusion
As I was fairly new to the UX world, I didnt have the confidence to push for the research required to create this product. I ran with what the director of Hatchet believed the product should do and not what the main administrator was requiring. I believe this would have saved us from underdelivering to expectations and we would have been able to bridge the gap of misunderstanding. Instead because of the miscommunication here, there was a noticeable power struggle/ strain between the managers of Hatchet and Bud Social.
Because this was an internal tool, we didn’t issue user testing so it wasn’t proven to work perfectly before development. Also regarding development - my contract did not extend past the design phase so, I wasn’t there to answer questions, problems that may have arisen, elements that may have required tweaking or complete a total fool-proof handover which was a real shame.
Despite the aspects I would change, it was a positive experience where I learned more about the capabilities of back and front-end development, how CSS libraries such as Tailwind expedite the design process and the importance of defining the goals across the whole team before commencing work!