QuillBot's Strategic Pivot

QuillBot’s Strategic Pivot from Writing to Communication

Executive Summary

This case study isn’t about growth metrics or engagement charts. It’s about supporting a company during a major pivot—and using design to keep momentum when everything is in flux.

When QuillBot’s CEO stepped into a part-time role in 2025, Learneo’s CEO took over and set a new strategic vision: evolve from an AI writing tool into an AI communications company, inspired by Canva’s ecosystem of creative and task-based tools.

My role was to create a navigation and information architecture and task template page that could scale to hundreds of new tools, reflect the new strategy, and make it easy for users to find what they need. The result was a persona/task-based navigation that reframed QuillBot’s experience around user intent and job to be done—not how the company is organized.

Context

After ChatGPT’s release in late 2022, QuillBot’s core differentiator—AI-powered paraphrasing—became a commodity. By early 2024, the data was trending downward: active users and engaged sessions were dropping, especially during months that traditionally showed strong growth.

This decline wasn’t seasonal. It was structural. Users were finding new writing alternatives, and QuillBot’s brand position as a “writing assistant” no longer reflected how people were solving problems. By mid-2025, the leadership change signaled a clear pivot: QuillBot would reposition itself as a communications platform, building an ecosystem of 600+ new tasks and tools designed to help people express ideas, not just rewrite them. My team’s mission: make that ecosystem usable, findable, and connected.

Historically, QuillBot’s usage and conversions rise ahead of summer break, so seeing a decline in March signaled a deeper problem. The data made it clear a strategic shift wasn’t optional — it was overdue. Building a Canva-like ecosystem is a major undertaking, and ideally, that transition would have started much earlier.

Challenge

We had to build a scalable navigation system while the business was pivoting underneath us. Deadlines kept shrinking, PMs were focused on speed, and the designer leading the work was talented but inexperienced with complex IA. She rarely pushed back, which meant I had to step in more than I wanted to.

The challenge was balancing delivery speed with stability: create something usable fast, but ensure it wouldn’t collapse when other teams integrated it into their workflow.

My Role

Directed the navigation architecture strategy and validation process
Managed one product designer and partnered closely with a UX researcher
Coached the designer to think through the end-to-end user journey, not just pages
Collaborated with Brand and Marketing to ensure alignment on templates and taxonomy
Intervened when execution risks threatened design quality

Goals

Create navigation that clearly communicates QuillBot’s new direction
Improve discoverability across 600+ new task-based tools
Design an IA flexible enough to scale and reorder as usage patterns evolve
Keep the design process grounded in user evidence, not stakeholder assumptions

Solution

We built a new navigation anchored in personas and goals, not internal labels. The old structure used terms like Products, Resources, and Downloads—common across SaaS sites but meaningless to users trying to accomplish something specific.

Research showed people thought in context: I’m a student writing a paper or I’m a professional polishing a presentation. We designed navigation paths starting with identity and intent—For Students, For Professionals, For Creatives—and connected them to task-based tools within each category.

We tested two prototypes in Figma Make:

Persona-based navigation (goal-driven)
Category-based navigation (traditional corporate taxonomy)

The persona model won decisively. Users understood it faster, found relevant tools quicker, and described it as “natural” and “personal.”

Execution

I encouraged the designer to prototype the navigation in Figma Make, leveraging its interactive “vibe coding” features to make transitions feel real. It became the first visible example of AI-enhanced design work inside QuillBot, and it raised visibility for our team’s approach.

Persona-based

The majority of users preferred this navigation, as participants identified with the persona types.

Category-based

Users found the term “Solutions” unclear and too corporate, preferring navigation labels that reflect their goals or identity.

Key Insights

Users think in jobs to be done, not product names.
Corporate labels may be industry-standard, but they force users to translate intent.
Persona-based navigation builds confidence because users see themselves in the experience.
Inconsistent categorization between personas caused confusion; the follow-up card sort clarified structure and naming.

Key takeaway:

Familiar labels aren’t enough. Clarity and alignment with user intent outperform convention.

The final navigation

Completing the card-sorting exercise helped improve the category groupings under professional, students and creatives and we changed Products to AI Tools - language we had explored early in the exploration phase of the work.

Final navigation

Creating the master template

I led creation of a master landing page template for Marketing to scale hundreds of new pages in our CMS, PageQ. As deadlines tightened, Marketing began duplicating older layouts, compounding UX/UI issues.

I stepped in to review pages, flag usability issues, and reopen feedback loops between Brand and Growth—not to police, but to protect user trust and prevent design debt.

This is an example of a high-fidelity template for a PDF converter tool, part of the strategic shift toward becoming a communications-focused company.

Addressing challenges ahead

As the navigation neared completion, the designer drafted an initial "boxes and arrows" user journey from the top-level navigation through category pages down to individual task pages. Alongside it, we had a large spreadsheet of task names handed off to the UX writer for grouping and editing.

I initially pushed back — defining structure and hierarchy is a designer’s job — but in this case, delegation made sense. The designer was still developing that systems-thinking muscle, and we needed progress more than perfect ownership.

The UX writer needed to visualize how these groupings would appear on the category pages, so I mapped out the entire flow myself — from navigation entry to task detail. This gave both the UX writer and designer a concrete reference, unblocked their workflow, and provided clarity around how 200+ tasks would fit under “Professionals" and other category pages.

It wasn’t ideal to step in, but it was the right leadership move. In moments like these, my job isn’t to do their work — it’s to keep the team moving when confidence dips or clarity is missing. The visual map became their north star, helping both roles regain momentum and align on the same user experience vision.

Results

Launch persona-based navigation supporting 600+ tools
Improved discoverability and task orientation for core users
Established flexible IA enabling future expansion
Reconnected Product, Brand, and Marketing around shared language
Reinforced design as a strategic partner through evidence-based decisions

Reflection

This project was never about a single launch. It was about using design to bring order and focus during a business pivot.

If I’d change one thing, it would be embedding Product Design earlier in the Marketing production workflow to prevent UX drift at scale. But overall, the navigation became the clearest expression of the new vision: a company that helps people communicate, not just write.

Design led that shift—not through visual polish, but through structure, clarity, and alignment.

Strategic Design Leadership

Strategic Unifier

I drove alignment across Product, Brand, and Marketing during a time of change. This meant protecting the design vision while staying pragmatic about delivery. The work proved that design leadership isn’t just about craft—it’s about helping a company adapt and move forward when the ground is shifting.