New Authoring Experience
Redesigned Appcues’ builder so non-technical teams can create on-brand experiences without custom CSS or workarounds.
Role
Lead Product Designer
In-app experiences for web applications
In-app experiences for iOS and Android
Automated journeys across channels
Context & Constraints
Appcues had multiple experience builders — Web Flows, Mobile Flows, and Workflows — each evolving independently over time. While this allowed teams to move quickly in the short term, it resulted in fragmented interaction patterns, limited customization, and compounding design and technical debt.
For customers, this meant relying on workarounds and custom code to achieve basic layout or styling needs. For internal teams, it slowed development, increased maintenance cost, and made systemic improvements increasingly risky as the platform grew.
Problem Statement
Appcues' builders limited customization for customers and constrained internal teams, making the system difficult to scale.
Evidence & signals
Multiple signals across customer feedback and sales insights pointed to customization and layout flexibility as a core source of friction.
Customers lacked control over layout and styling within the builder.
Achieving basic designs often required custom CSS or workarounds.
Customization surfaced repeatedly as a blocker in sales and closed-lost feedback.
Customer feedback
“Not enough flexibility in the flow builder to adjust things like overall container size, padding, etc. Too much has to rely on adjusting CSS in the theme vs easy to manage in the flow builder.”
Had to use custom code to make it look just how I wanted to (rounded corners)
Border radius is not working; can’t have a dynamic control over the size of the modal other than on the theme settings instead of when creating the modal.
it is SO difficult to use… i cannot customize the size of the flow pop-up or even sections of the pop up.
“Not enough flexibility in the flow builder to adjust things like overall container size, padding, etc. Too much has to rely on adjusting CSS in the theme vs easy to manage in the flow builder.”
Had to use custom code to make it look just how I wanted to (rounded corners)
Border radius is not working; can’t have a dynamic control over the size of the modal other than on the theme settings instead of when creating the modal.
it is SO difficult to use… i cannot customize the size of the flow pop-up or even sections of the pop up.
Incremental fixes weren't enough
Auditing the legacy builder showed that layout, styling, and rendering were tightly coupled, limiting flexibility and making customization expensive to support.
We considered incrementally updating the existing SDK and builder, but ruled it out due to the risk of breaking compatibility with customer experiences and the compounding cost of maintaining divergent systems.
Instead, we redesigned the underlying authoring model. This required alignment across Web, Mobile, and Workflows teams, and close partnership with the Principal Engineer to redefine the layout system and core architectural primitives, including themes, localization, and layout behavior.
Layout - Before
The legacy system constrained how content blocks could be positioned and how layouts were divided, forcing users to rely on workarounds for common designs.
Layout - After
The new layout system gives users direct control over structure through a visual, WYSIWYG interface.
Styling controls
Customization moved into the builder through dedicated controls for common needs like spacing, borders, shadows, and corner radius.
Advanced users can also extend styles directly when deeper control is needed.
Spacing controls
Style controls
Custom CSS support
Content blocks
With the new layout and customization system in place, content blocks were redesigned to take full advantage of these capabilities.
Image
Image blocks can now be support a more specific features to make sure your images look the way you need.
Surveys
Survey blocks were designed with more customization options but also enabling customers to create full on surveys
Button
Buttons were updated to support all the styling options and customizations available to all blocks.
Next Steps
Validate the new authoring model through beta feedback.
Re-run UMUX-Lite to benchmark improvements against the legacy builder.
Impact
This work directly addressed revenue risk and unlockable growth tied to customization limitations.
ARR at risk from churn: ~$3.6M
Sales opportunities (ARR): ~$1.2M
Based on closed-lost new business and expansion opportunities.
Thanks for your time!