Scalable UX for Enterprise SaaS

Led a design team in overhauling Citrix’s flagship cloud product, working alongside a dedicated UX research team to conduct statistically significant usability studies. Partnered directly with product management and engineering to align design strategy with feasible execution, balancing enterprise complexity with intuitive workflows to ensure both technical and non-technical users could navigate and succeed.

Citrix | UX Design Lead / Manager | Jul 2017 – Aug 2019

1. Context & Challenge

Citrix provides enterprise-level cloud services to a global customer base with varied needs and technical skill levels. Over time, the flagship cloud product’s interface became fragmented — with inconsistent patterns, buried functionality, and workflows that were efficient for some users but confusing for others.

The challenge: Redesign and deliver the experience across the full product lifecycle, improving usability and consistency without disrupting enterprise customers managing critical, ongoing workloads.

2. My Role

As UX Design Lead & Design Manager, I was responsible for:

  • Setting the design vision for the cloud product overhaul

  • Collaborating with the UX research team to design and interpret large-scale, statistically significant studies

  • Managing and mentoring a team of designers in the Raleigh office

  • Partnering with Product Management and Engineering to align on priorities, refine the backlog, and execute phased delivery

Screenshot of Citrix Workspace interface showing applications, desktops, and files with user Mary Berman logged in.
Screenshot of Citrix Workspace interface showing applications, desktops, and files with user Mary Berman logged in.

3. Research & Discovery

Methods used:

  • Statistically Significant Usability Studies – Large-scale testing to ensure changes would benefit the majority of users without introducing regressions

  • Task Success Rate & Time-on-Task Analysis – Baseline measurement to quantify improvements

  • Heuristic Evaluations – Identified inconsistencies and accessibility issues across the interface

  • Competitive Benchmarking – Compared workflows to competing platforms to spot competitive gaps

Key insights:

  • Navigation patterns were inconsistent between related products, slowing multi-product users

  • Some core tasks took 2–3x longer for non-technical users

  • Technical users valued direct access to advanced features, while less technical users needed clear, guided paths

Screenshot of a digital note titled 'IWS: Design Architecture – Collab Notes' with bulleted principles about notifications, entry and exit points, dashboards, user needs, and content for UI design.
Screenshot of a document titled 'Customer Feedback Sessions' with sections summarizing insights from user feedback, including navigation issues, list page info, order view, chart, and table details.
Screenshot of a cloud storage interface showing files organized under labels 'O365,' 'G Suite,' and 'iWork', with a title 'Intelligent Workspace Overlap' and descriptive text about AI/ML integration.

4. Design & Iteration

  • Integrated legacy systems with newly acquired startup’s micro-app functionality, bringing disparate applications together within a seamless experience

  • Introduced progressive disclosure to keep interfaces clean while making advanced features easily accessible

  • Partnered with engineering to phase releases, minimizing risk of disruption to ongoing workloads

  • Established core navigation and interaction patterns to unify workflows across cloud products

Diagram showing steps for adding a service integration within a platform, including lists of compatible and incompatible services, with interface illustrations for service selection and toggling status options.

5. Outcomes & Impact

  • Improved task success rates by measurable margins in follow-up usability studies

  • Comprehensive, single platform significantly reduced context-switching and frustration, bringing the most critical data and actions to the user, rather than forcing the user to hunt for them inside dozens of complex enterprise applications

  • Increased design system adoption across multiple Citrix products, improving consistency and reducing rework

Screenshot of Citrix Workspace dashboard showing activity feed, recommended actions, recent apps, recent files, and desktops, with user profile and interface options.

6. Reflection & Relevance

This work reinforced the value of combining rigorous, large-scale research with careful iteration, cross-functional execution, and phased releases in a complex enterprise environment. The ability to unify multiple disparate systems into a single, cohesive control point for diverse users is directly applicable to creating intuitive, highly integrated B2B software.