Empowering marketers with insights that drive confidence

Overview

Tenon is a CRM with thousands of marketers creating, managing, and optimizing their campaigns.

With control over email/SMS campaigns, contacts, attribution, and performance across the customer lifecycle, marketers using Tenon’s CRM do important work for their teams. However, the platform’s original home page wasn’t supporting marketers with the streamlined processes they expected. My role during my internship at Tenon was to redesign the home page as a functional MVP.

Problem

The homepage was not helping marketers move through their day.

The platform’s original home page was just an empty placeholder screen created by developers. It showed basic email activity, but offered no real orientation, insight, or action. There was friction embedded within every action and certainly did not support the streamlined CRM processes marketers expected.

Navigating All the Complexity

The final elements were straightforward, but there were big problems hidden within.

Here are the final elements I handed off.

The possibilities for the features on the homepage were initially overwhelming—this was essentially a blank canvas where anything could be inserted. Thankfully, initial conversations with PMs helped reveal the business case that had to be met: support user retention and help marketers make confident decisions. But I still needed to understand the marketer’s perspective and what their day-to-day workflows looked like…

User Research

Researching what marketers value in their CRM software.

To close that gap, I combined user interviews, a brief focus group, competitive analysis, heuristic evaluation, and contextual inquiry. Research was limited by time and budget, so I used a small but fast-moving mix of methods to understand how marketers actually worked through the platform.

That process mapped a consistent workflow:

The workflow itself was not broken. Marketers generally knew what they needed to do. The problem was the friction layered into every step.

Users were constantly jumping between pages, scrolling through long tables, manually searching for campaigns, and piecing together performance across different objects. Each issue looked small on its own, but together they increased cognitive load and made the product feel heavier than it needed to be.

I grouped these problems into three core friction types:

Framing the problem this way helped me move from isolated usability issues to a more systemic opportunity. The homepage did not just need better widgets. It needed to reduce friction across the marketer's daily workflow.

Exploring the Problem

My mission was to bring clarity to this mess.

I used affinity mapping to cluster ideas directly around the workflow breakdowns, then narrowed scope through card sorting across three tiers: realistic, optional, and stretch. After that, I used an impact versus effort evaluation to prioritize concepts based on how much they reduced workflow friction, how feasible they were for engineering, and whether the required data was actually available and reliable

This process cut ideas that depended on immature data models or heavy backend work and surfaced a clearer MVP direction. I then moved into sketches and low-fidelity wireframes to test hierarchy, layout, and entry points into key workflows.

Iterations and Explorations

How do we provide valuable performance insights?

Everything else on the homepage was relatively straightforward and tested well with users. The main open question was how to surface performance insights in a way that felt useful, lightweight, and realistic to ship.

Competitive analysis showed that other marketing CRM homepages often relied on data visualization to communicate performance at a glance. Early on, that direction had internal support and I explored chart-driven summaries for campaign health.

Later in the process, PMs shifted direction and reserved data visualization for a future reports page. I pivoted to an AI-driven performance section highlighting high and low performers.

As feasibility reviews progressed, developers flagged backend aggregation and predictive logic constraints that Tenon's current system could not support reliably. I pulled the concept back to the core user need: fast, digestible performance feedback.

That led to the grounded Recent Performance module built from existing metrics, giving users a strong pulse check without speculative infrastructure.

Final Designs

I prioritized a simple, familiar, and clean interface.

With orientation, navigation, and insight friction clearly defined, I designed the homepage to function as a control center for the marketer's daily workflow.

The goal was not just to improve a screen. It was to improve how marketers moved through login, action, and monitoring as one continuous loop, shifting the homepage from a passive landing page to an operational starting point.

Outcomes

The project moved faster than expected and created momentum beyond the original scope.

Reflection

What I learned