MC+

Context

In 2025, Mobile Commons spun out of Upland Software as an independent company, carrying four products that had never been built to work together. mCommons served nonprofits, Waterfall served retail and CPG, Rant & Rave handled CX measurement, and Hipcricket served media — each with its own users, navigation, interface logic and visual language.

The cost showed up on both sides. Customers switched between tools to finish workflows that should have been one flow. Internally, teams duplicated effort with no shared foundation, while competitors like Braze, Attentive and MoEngage were shipping unified, AI-assisted platforms.

Leadership's answer was a three-year plan to converge all four into one AI-driven, multi-channel platform (called MC² internally). Its north star: customers ask for an outcome, and the platform delivers it. The business case was clear. The design problem was not.

The brief: rethink navigation, compete with modern messaging platforms, and make the product feel new and better without disorienting long-time customers. Less construction-heavy, more guided, focused on what the user wants to accomplish this session.

My role

I was the Lead Product Designer and the only designer on MC+, named in the company roadmap as the owner of UI/UX for the unified platform and its reusable component system.

• Owned: product audit, information architecture, UI shell, design system, platform UI, prototypes, engineering handoff.
• Partnered with: product leadership on vision and roadmap; product managers across the four product lines; engineering and architecture on the platform build plan.
• Context that shaped the work: six years designing across these same products at Upland, so I started the audit already knowing where each product's users struggled.
• Org model: the company adopted unFIX, with UI/UX Design System as its own capability serving every product stream. The system I built was that capability.

Process

Five phases, run mostly in sequence, with alignment running through all of them.

1. Discovery and audit. Mapped users, core workflows and UI patterns across all four products before opening Figma. Benchmarked respond.io, MoEngage, Gupshup, Braze, Attentive and Strive.
2. Vision mocks. Leadership asked for a "side quest": rough, innovation-forward homepage and broadcast mocks to give the whole company a tangible picture of where MC+ could go. These set the outcome-oriented direction.
3. Information architecture. Collapsed four separate navigation structures into one two-level model: an icon-only primary rail plus contextual section navigation.
4. Design system. Built the foundation from zero: atoms, components, patterns and UI shell; 12/8/4-column grid on an 8px scale; WCAG AA as a baseline, not a pass at the end.
5. Platform UI and handoff. Designed core flows across all four products' workflows, with specs, prototypes and documented components delivered for engineering.

Alignment ran throughout: design reviews with each product line so no team felt its users had become second-class in the new platform.

Key decisions

Four decisions carry the project. Each one was a tradeoff.

1. Build the system from zero

Each product had evolved independently. Inheriting any one of them as the base would have made the other three second-class from day one, and carried over its debt. A new foundation was slower up front but was the only way to get genuine synthesis.

Starting from zero wasn't a setback. It was the right call.

2. An outcome-oriented home, not a dashboard

The old products opened onto everything at once. MC+ opened on "What do you want to accomplish today?": pick up where you left off, choose your top action (send a message, build a group, check results), and get guided from there. Reporting moved to its own destination instead of crowding the home.

This was the UI expression of the company's north star: ask for an outcome, the platform delivers.

3. One shell that flexes per product

A persistent UI shell (primary rail, contextual secondary nav, top bar, page header with configurable left and right slots) let four very different workflows live in one frame. Permanent regions shrink the grid; temporary ones like drawers and overlays never shift it. This mattered because the roadmap called for configurable, vertical-specific modules on one platform.

4. Data tables built for scale and scanning

All four products are list-heavy: contacts, campaigns, broadcasts, responses. I defined one table system: header controls, a dynamic filter-chip bar with AND/OR logic, resizable columns (155px minimum, ~480–600px soft max), and typed cells including campaign-message previews truncated to 1–2 lines. Filters stay visible as chips rather than hidden in a panel, because seeing what's applied matters more than a clean header.

Outcome

I delivered the complete MC+ platform design and a design system built from zero, ready for engineering. In mid-2026, shifting business priorities led the company to archive the initiative before development began.

• Unified platform design: one coherent experience covering the core workflows of all four legacy products.
• Design system from zero: a component library and UI shell flexible enough for four products' patterns, documented with grid, accessibility and behavior rules.
• Development-ready handoff: specs, prototypes and component documentation delivered to engineering.
• The work outlived the project: patterns from the system carried into the legacy products, including [add the concrete example: data tables? Broadcast Builder?].

Reflection

Consolidation projects fail when they treat one product as the default and bolt the others onto it. Building from zero forced real synthesis instead of a shortcut.

The second lesson is about timing. A platform this size lives or dies on organizational stability as much as design quality. Next time I'd push earlier to ship one slice, like the new shell or the table system inside a legacy product, so value lands before priorities can shift. The roadmap's own microservices idea pointed that way; I'd lean on it harder from the design side.