Rebuilding B2B SaaS frontend

Overview and objectives

Babele is a web platform that helps companies better organize their projects in order to solve socially impactful problems. It offers methodologies that a project can follow and tools for better communication and collaboration. The core idea is that the best solution for a community is found through collaboration.

I joined the project as a team lead, together with a team and our job was to rebuild the front-end in order to:

• Improve user interface and experience
• Cut loading times to make UI interactions smoother
• Reduce the cost of adding new features

Challenges

To address the performance and interface issues, we redesigned and rebuilt the platform front end from scratch, evaluating and removing features that were no longer needed by users. It was a long process that we did it through the whole development.

While this process of stripping back the functionality was challenging at times, the process resulted in a much leaner application, forming a foundation for UI/UX improvements.

Working within the limitations presented by the legacy back-end, we were still able to make significant performance gains, simply by optimizing the front-end.

Outcome

Post-launch, Babele saw a significant reduction in bounce rate, directly related to the improved UI, and a substantial drop in load times. New feature development is now a realistic prospect, with customization costs much lower than for the previous platform.

We were able to cut loading times by about 70% and reduce the cost of adding new features. This led to a 23% increase in user retention.