HourStack is a visual time and task management platform that helps individuals and teams plan, track, and analyze their time. As the team's sole designer, I owned the complete design vision across brand, product, and marketing—building a unified identity and user experience from the ground up.
My work ranged from defining the brand language and design system to designing intricate product features and workflows, ensuring a cohesive and intuitive experience across every touchpoint.
What I did
Year
2020 - 2023
Role
UX/UI Designer (In-house)
Process & Approach
At the core: flexible, powerful, and simple to use time management
Our small but nimble team transformed HourStack from MVP into a seamless, intuitive, and thoughtful product experience. The aim was to help empower users to make the most of their time: designing a tool that felt simple, efficient, and satisfying to use while enabling them to track the detailed, actionable data (tagging, team visibility, reports) needed for a variety of resource management workflows.
Our user-centric approach
I grounded design decisions in our users, using a combination of product analytics, competitor research, direct customer feedback (including surveys, support queries, and beta feature testing) to determine and prioritize product improvements. With a diverse range of roles and workspaces, ranging from solopreneurs to large enterprise teams, I balanced complex feature needs of power users with an approachable learning curve: building strong core functionality with consistent and intuitive interaction patterns, using progressive disclosure of additional or secondary features, and including informative tooltips and support throughout.
My work helped evolve and elevate HourStack's core time management and reporting features, expand the product with highly-requested native project management, and bring thoughtful details throughout to give users the best possible experience. We shipped features including new native task views, enhanced integration and template functionalities, comprehensive admin and permission management, and regular UX/UI updates focused on giving users a friction-free, visually responsive, and efficient time management experience.
A design system created with seamless interactions, flexibility, and scale in mind
I created a comprehensive design system to maintain consistency across the product and streamline the development process, and designed interfaces for various integrations and a Chrome extension to extend HourStack's capabilities. This included a semantic color system for both dark and light modes, typographic guidelines, and a complete component library.
Elevating the brand with a new identity
I created a distinguishable, modern brand identity, including an updated logo, color palette, and typography. Rooted in the principle of simplicity and feeling of flow designed into the product, the new identity gives visual resonance identity to both existing and prospective users.
