Problem
GfK's Market Intelligence product tracks point-of-sale data for manufacturers like Lenovo and Panasonic. Channels are genuinely hierarchical, up to eight levels deep, but the platform drew that hierarchy flat, so reading the structure was the job rather than the starting point. Nothing on the market solved this shape of problem directly.
Approach
Planned and facilitated a week-long remote design sprint with around 20 people across the squad and sales department. The governing rule: the user sees the most granular view their subscription permits. Paper prototyping produced three candidates; weekly internal testing narrowed it to lines versus dots, then an A/B test with real sales directors at Philips, Samsung, Hitachi and Miele settled it. Dots won, and not narrowly.
Outcome
Shipped into gfknewron. The more useful outcome was the one nobody briefed: the same flaw in how data was presented surfaced in three further platform features, turning a single-page fix into a case for a platform-wide redesign.