AdBlock and Adblock Plus sold premium to overlapping users, and neither product knew who any of them were. I was the only designer on the fix, across Android, iOS, backend, legal and QA.
Lead product designer · 10 weeks · eyeo
None of them had an account
Support data first
I went to the tickets before I touched the UI. There were 74,000 that year, and 12,000 of them were about billing and payment.
Then I asked every engineering team the same four questions.
A key, not a person
The first question turned out to be the whole project. On AdBlock, a paying customer was a random license key with no email attached, on purpose. Adblock Plus had its own version. Across both products there were seven kinds of users, and not one of them was a person we could reach.
You had to leave the extension to verify your email because of an old privacy decision. That made sense when AdBlock was free. Once we were selling premium on every device, it didn't. I made the case to change it, and legal agreed.
One-time password
The answer was almost boring: no passwords. Every way in now ends at the same place. Enter your email, get a code, you're in.
No more dead ends
I rewrote the multi-device messaging so people knew where premium applied, and replaced dead-end errors with ones that said what had happened and what to do next.
Reflection
Understanding the system was the design work. The UI was just the output. You can't simplify what you don't actually understand.