The Difference of User-Centered Design

What’s the first thing you notice about a product? Is it the speed? The features? The responsiveness?

Probably not.

The first thing you notice – whether you know you’re doing it or not – is how the product looks.

This is true of everything from coffee cups to SaaS apps. Humans judge books by their covers all the time, yet great design extends far beneath just a cover.

Design is a foundational pillar of Visor, shaping not just the aesthetics of our product but also the experience, functionality, and emotional connection users have with it. As a Project Portfolio Management software, our users aren’t the only ones looking at Visor. They need to be able to share and present everything they create – so how Visor looks has an impact on their jobs, not just how they work. It’s mission-critical that we design our product for the user’s ease and functionality while giving them a way to communicate their ideas effectively.

Design is not just an aesthetic layer—it defines how users interact with our software, how they perceive its capabilities and, ultimately, how successful they are in using it to manage their projects. A well-designed product feels intuitive, reliable, and empowering. With Visor, we strive to create an interface that not only looks great but also enhances productivity and collaboration. And that’s only possible if our design is user-first.

I’m Jonathan Slavuter, and I’m the Principal Product Designer at Visor. I’m responsible for the entire design and representation of the user experience at Visor. We think of our “product” as everything user-facing. So I have a hand in the app itself, but also the website, marketing material, and more. It’s all about making sure that the brand looks and feels very cohesive both within and outside of the app itself.

I’ve been in the design field since 2012 and, before that, I had a background in psychology, with a BA in Psychology and experience as a research coordinator and multi-sensory therapy specialist. Design and aesthetics impact the way we feel about the things we interact with, and I bring that experience and know-how to Visor.

As Visor begins to incorporate AI templates (a process I was deeply involved in – but more on that shortly), leading with intuitive and impactful design is more important than ever before.

A view of the progress on AI template designs

The best-designed products don’t just work well; they invite users to engage, explore, and share with confidence. That’s the goal for everything we do. This article is my way of explaining more of Visor’s design philosophy, and why it’s so crucial to the overall success of our app.

Designing for the User

User-centered design is at the heart of every decision Visor makes. Because project managers rely on clear, professional visuals to present their work, Visor’s design philosophy ensures that every element—from layout to color choices—is optimized for clarity and ease of use.

Our users care deeply about how their data is presented – success in this space often rides on how well project managers can present their progress and plans. They spend hours fine-tuning visual elements to ensure clarity, professionalism, and impact. It’s kind of an honor to not only get a window into all that effort, but to be trusted with such a big part of someone’s professional success.

An example of design workbooks in Visor

Trust is built through design. The moment a new user opens Visor, they should feel that they are using a premium product – one that has been thoughtfully designed for them. Every pixel matters. So we have to center the user in every choice we make.

The decision making process around design direction is a lot more art than science, but we still try to include as much science as we can. We use data in all of our product decisions, but it’s especially important here.

We leverage a few different points here:

• User session analysis (via Fullstory) to observe real interactions, identifying areas where users struggle or drop off.
• Customer interviews to gather qualitative insights on pain points, workflows, and unmet needs.
• Quantitative data (clicks, engagement, workflow paths) to validate design effectiveness and prioritize improvements.
• Competitive research to benchmark against industry leaders and identify opportunities for differentiation.
• Internal use to get an in-depth sense of how the product feels when you’re using it yourself. (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve pulled team members into calls to ask them exactly how they’re interacting with Visor.)

All of that information comes together to help me synthesize what seems to be working well and what parts of the product may need a little bit of retooling and rethinking. But between all of that research and then my own subject matter expertise and competitive research, there are a lot of factors that influence how ultimately product design decisions get made.

The number one rule is that we can’t make assumptions. You can never assume what users are going to understand. Making sure that you take yourself and your ego out of the equation is the only way to create something truly valuable to others.

Rather than making assumptions, we design with evidence. Is it more work? Of course! But it’s a much better payoff. The emphasis on evidence-based design means that every feature is crafted to enhance user experience, making project presentation seamless and effective.

Solving Complex Challenges Through Design

As Visor scales, our design ensures that complexity remains manageable, maintaining a balance between power and simplicity. Our users are evolving – bigger teams, more projects, more tasks – and we’re growing with them.

I want to get into the user’s headspace as much as possible, that’s the person on the other end of my designs, the person who’s trying to use Visor.

I think about what my colleagues, who actively use Visor, are trying to do. I think about the people who are super familiar with spreadsheets and project management platforms and have been doing this for decades and know exactly what to expect. But I also think about all of the people who’ve not grown up in the digital space and they’re a little bit less mature in their understanding of our product.

A qudarant representing different levels of user maturity and UX comfort

More often than not, the real-life scenario is a mix of maturity levels in a common workspace, with several different configurations of working relationships. There’s the solo person who’s just using Visor on their own. There’s the collaboration where effort and usage is equally distributed and there isn’t really much of a hierarchy. Then there’s very hierarchical, structured teams.

I want to try my best to make Visor as approachable and easy to use as possible for all of those groups. Design has a lot of power to level the playing field and make the app accessible for a wide variety of users. That’s not something we always see.

When it comes to Project Portfolio Management software, we see some similar problems in the market. Often that’s the need to work with lots of integrated data and the struggle of different types and technical levels of customers using the same tool.

It comes down to the tangibles. What story is the data telling me about what the user actually needs to accomplish? Innovation is not only about continuing to expand into every shiny new feature. It’s also about improving on existing elements and making them ever more user-centered.

This has some inherent challenges, of course. You can only focus on so much at once. Right now, for Visor, we’re focused on speed. But we have to temper it, never making concessions that make fast the enemy of good. We can’t put out an inferior product. We’re in a red ocean with so much competition; we’re not going to out-feature or out-sell all of the giant companies that have been around for a decade plus. Our advantage is that we can out-perform them for the users we focus on the most – smaller companies who don’t need every Enterprise bell and whistle. We’re creating a more intuitive experience that isn’t encumbered by a bloated system.

Design progress when we created the dashboard view

It makes me think of Canva and Photoshop – Photoshop was the only serious option for image creation and editing for such a long time, but it was highly technical. Canva recognized this, knew that so many users were actually intimidated by all those features, and created a more streamlined, user-friendly product just for that audience. They poked holes in Photoshop’s armor by prioritizing a different set of potential customers – just like what Visor is doing compared to giants like Smartsheet or Asana. We have a small enough product that we can still explore those systemic decisions much more nimbly than they can.

We believe this market has the most potential to grow based on users of this level. It’s no longer just the massive enterprises doing portfolio management. So it’s not about stealing business from someone else, it’s about expanding the market and making it possible for those at the lower-end of the needs range to be able to achieve their goals with a tool designed for their level of needs and experience. 

To that end, we focus on integrations (we use a unique tech called RelayIQ to make these best-of-breed compared to our competitors – I’m proud to say design had a big hand in that, which you can read more about in the linked article). These integrations are more robust than our competitors, but they’re also more native feeling. I’ve worked hard to make sure integrated data looks and behaves like you made it in Visor from the start.

The result is crystal clear.

Design Clarity in Action: Crystalmorphism

I want to diverge from all that for a second so I can talk about one of the coolest ways that design and product converge in Visor.

Most products that are built with functionality first run into the same problem: what design language fits the brand, fits the product, and stands out from the crowd?

One of the progress shots for the grid “group by” functionality

We needed to solve that problem to have a strong chance in the market. The natural starting point was the name: Visor. Visors help you see more clearly. We thought about that and it made us think about glass, but glass is already a popular brand style in the tech space. So we dug deeper, thinking about the future of AI, along with virtual and augmented reality, we thought about the things that make computers run.

We ultimately kept sticking to the term “crystal clear.”

Crystalmorphism is a set of design principles like Glassmorphism, the design philosophy Apple ascribes to. Technically it’s about making things look crystalline – but it’s so much more than that.

On one level, it covers guidelines for how the product is meant to look – clarity for the user wins over our own creativity, but Visor aims to have a specific look and feel, taking inspiration from other design philosophies to create something whole and unique of our own. We have our own ideas of how we want things to feel for the end user. It comes together in this way. It’s aesthetically beautiful and has a particular energy to it that feels unique and meaningful to us.

On another level, it’s reflective of how we think about Visor’s mission. Information crystallizes in your mind. When everything is out there right in front of you, you gain a sense of clarity. We want to break down barriers and silos of information to create crystal clarity and get everyone in sync – crystalized.

The imperatives of crystalmorphism were clear:

1. Be usable and accessible – high contrast, clear foreground, easy to use (this is much easier with crystals vs glass)
2. It had to be beautiful – something exciting, inviting, and fun to use

This philosophy and design direction brings life and movement – color and light – into a “static” product. Even Visor as a name is all about seeing clearly – crystal-clarity is therefore a natural fit for what we want to convey.

Crystalmorphism reinforces Visor’s user-centered approach. Unlike purely aesthetic design trends, crystalmorphism is deeply tied to usability, ensuring that information is presented in a way that is easy to digest and interact with.

Design Is Not an Afterthought

I joined Visor pre-release. I’ve known Visor from the early stages. Early on, the goal was functionality – get something that worked, keep it simple. I’ve really enjoyed watching the product grow into something far more design-driven. It works now, so we can create something people want to show off. We know what our product is, we know how we can deliver value, and we know how our users want to interact with us – it’s only getting more and more clear that Visor is doing something special.

The biggest problem that I’ve been trying to solve in Visor’s design over the last couple of years is as simple as making it increasingly user-friendly and self descriptive.

A sneak peek at some new designs at Visor!

When I first joined Visor, there were a lot of assumptions on what users understood about the product, about how to use Visor, and I wanted to sort of challenge some of those assumptions. And so making Visor more user friendly, making it more descriptive and more orienting to users, might not seem like the coolest thing that we could do, but I think it’s the part of the product that likely has the biggest impact that most users might not even realize.

The Project Portfolio Management space is saturated with feature-heavy platforms. Instead of competing on raw functionality, Visor differentiates through quality, workflow, and experience (QWE). I’ve worked with companies where design was a secondary. It was something that followed along after product decisions and seemed more like a “finishing touch.” I don’t like that method. Design shines when it’s thoroughly integrated throughout the feature-development process.

By challenging assumptions and making the product more self-explanatory, Visor eliminates friction in the user experience. This commitment to intuitive design allows users to focus on their work rather than on learning how to navigate the software, reinforcing the idea that great design is not just about aesthetics but about empowering users.

Design in Action: AI Templates

When we started building Visor’s new AI template feature, we had a big goal of making it seamless. Instead of throwing flashy AI right in the user’s face, we wanted to make it a more ambient, subtle function that played nicely with how users were already interacting with the product.

A lot of that fell to me in terms of determining how we could deliver the most value with this new feature.

The tactical element of this is clear: reduce the friction of configuration. From a user perspective, this is saying, “I can get to the value of these charts and visualizations faster and make it more shareable with my stakeholders.”

A preview of AI Templates in action!

From the design side, I’m taking that goal and thinking about what it realistically means. The project manager using these templates is probably sharing with their CEO – so it needs to be very strategic. They’re probably sharing across different departments, so it needs to have flexible framing different people will understand.

Then we needed to connect to the UI aspect. We wanted that to flow, so the biggest value was in minimizing the tangible aspects. We want it to become an interstitial layer of the workflow. We don’t want to draw attention to it as much as possible. We want to make sure that it feels seamless while being faster than if you were to set up templates on your own.

Sometimes the best design is what you don’t notice. By making AI a seamless, almost invisible layer of the workflow, Visor upholds its core philosophy—design should always serve the user, enhancing efficiency without disrupting familiar processes.

Crystal Clarity in Design – and Beyond

At Visor, design isn’t just about making things look good. It’s about making them work better for the people who care the most.

By prioritizing user needs, integrating design into every stage of product development, and focusing on high-quality innovation, we ensure that every interaction with Visor feels intuitive, engaging, and valuable.

Our design philosophy isn’t static; it’s a continuous evolution shaped by user feedback, industry trends, and our relentless pursuit of excellence. Because great design isn’t just an advantage – it’s the foundation of everything we build.

Jonathan Slavuter

Jonathan Slavuter

Principal Engineer

Jonathan Slavuter is Visor's Principal Designer. A UX & Product Designer with an interdisciplinary background in tech, art and psychology, Jonathan has a wealth of experience building end-to-end user-centric products.