Olly Olly
App Redesign & Design System
Olly Olly is a B2B SaaS platform that helps small home service businesses — plumbers, electricians, floor installers — compete on Google and social media across the US.
The core product is a mobile app used daily by business owners to manage their online reputation: Google Business Profile, reviews, social media posts, and local search rankings.
By mid-2025, the company had grown significantly.
The Problem
The existing app was built in layers — features added reactively over time, often in response to urgent user feedback or business pivots. The result was a product that felt fragmented: inconsistent typography, strong colors that didn’t position Olly Olly as a modern SaaS company, and navigation flows that had been patched rather than designed.
When the company launched a new website that reflected its current direction, the gap between the web presence and the app became impossible to ignore. A redesign wasn’t just a visual decision — it was a product maturity decision.
The Design System told the same story. The existing library had limited components, no nested instances, no booleans, no slot architecture. Every new feature required designers and engineers to solve the same problems from scratch. The system couldn’t scale with the product.
My Role
I owned the end-to-end redesign: from concept and information architecture to final components, engineering documentation, and handoff. I worked in close collaboration with engineering throughout — not just at the end — to align on technical feasibility before committing to design direction.
Key Design Decisions
Boost Score — educating through a metric
One of the central challenges was behavioral: SMB owners weren’t completing the actions that would actually improve their Google ranking. They weren’t posting consistently, responding to reviews, or keeping their profiles updated — not because they didn’t want to, but because they didn’t understand the connection between those actions and business outcomes.
The Boost Score turned that connection into a visible metric. A single score — built from profile completeness, review activity, and social posting frequency — gave users a clear picture of where they stood and what to do next. Paired with Quick Wins (one-tap recommended actions), it moved users from passive awareness to active behavior.
Social Media Studio — removing friction from the most-used feature
Social media posting was already the most-accessed area of the app. The opportunity wasn’t to add more — it was to make the existing behavior faster and smarter.
We introduced six creation modes: AI-Powered (generates a post from business history and profile data), Special Offer for GBP, Before & After, Photo-to-Video, Review Spotlight, and Start From Scratch. Each mode removes the blank-canvas problem for the most common posting scenarios.
The hardest part wasn’t the modes themselves — it was the creation flow. The previous flow had been adapted multiple times. We rebuilt it from scratch, went through several versions, and hit real engineering constraints along the way. The final flow was a negotiation between what the design needed to deliver a good experience and what engineering could feasibly build in the timeframe. We got to a solution we both stood behind.
AI enhancement was added inside the flow — users can write their caption freely and use AI to generate tonal variations: more professional, more friendly, more casual. The AI doesn’t replace the user’s voice; it extends it.
Heatmap — making local search ranking tangible
The Heatmap was the most technically and conceptually complex feature of the redesign. The product shows a 7×7 grid of 49 geographic points around the business location. Each point represents a Google search ranking for a specific keyword in that area.
The design challenge was translating a dense data model into something an SMB owner — not a marketer, not an SEO specialist — could understand and act on. We validated the concept through client interviews before building, which confirmed that the core insight (seeing exactly where you rank vs. competitors, block by block) had genuine value. The final design lets users tap any point to see who occupies the top 3 positions in that area and compare against their own ranking — creating a direct, visual argument for why content and optimization matter.
Design System — building infrastructure that scales
The new Design System wasn’t a visual refresh. It was a structural rebuild with a different philosophy: composability over customization.
We introduced nested instances, boolean properties, and a slot-based architecture that lets designers and engineers assemble complex interfaces from a small set of primitives — rather than building bespoke components for every screen. We defined a new spacing scale, type system, effects library, icon library with hundreds of entries, and a full set of interaction states.
The practical result: engineering no longer needs to interpret design decisions for common patterns. A confirmation modal, a success screen, a loading state — all defined, documented, and accessible in the system. New products are faster to design and faster to ship because the foundational decisions are already made.
Results
The redesigned app launched in January 2026. In the five months following launch:
58% to 84%
115%
~28k
36%
These results coincided with the app launch alongside a new company website and marketing campaigns. The design was one part of a coordinated product and growth effort.
What I'd Do Differently
The redesign happened without formal user research at the start. Decisions were driven by product intuition, competitive analysis, and close collaboration with leadership. The outcomes were strong — but with structured discovery upfront, particularly around the Heatmap and the Social Media creation flow, we likely would have arrived at the right answers faster and with fewer iteration cycles.
This is part of why I’ve since introduced user research as a standard step in our product process — including client interviews for the Franchise Dashboard and Marketing Dashboard that followed.