Joshua Garcia
Joshua Garcia

The Disco Network

Simplified onboarding with clearer paths for every brand.

This project rebuilt brand setup to make onboarding intuitive and adaptable for every brand. The previous flow was rigid and slowed growth. Brands can now choose how they participate: advertise to grow their reach, publish to monetize post-purchase pages, or do both. This flexibility created a faster, more scalable foundation for Disco’s growing network.

Role:

Led systems design, product strategy, and end-to-end design

Date:

Oct ’24–Feb ’25

Desktop onboarding flow for Disco showing redesigned brand setup screens. Demonstrates a simplified, two-phase onboarding experience that helps brands create profiles, define categories, and launch offers. Highlights scalable UX patterns for faster setup, clearer navigation, and flexible brand participation across advertising and publishing.

Why the system had to change

As Disco grew, the system that once worked began to strain. A single control managed both advertising and publishing, creating confusion and support bottlenecks. Brands needed clearer guidance and autonomy to launch without one-to-one support, but the old setup couldn’t scale to meet those needs.

Diagram showing the original Disco brand setup and onboarding flow. Highlights UX friction points such as unclear paths, off-platform steps, and support-heavy actions. Used to identify system-level pain points and guide the redesign toward a scalable, self-serve onboarding experience for brands.

Reducing friction in onboarding

The previous onboarding flow was outdated and rigid. It asked for details no longer relevant, forced every brand through the same setup, and offered no clear next step once complete. Brands finished setup but didn’t know how to move forward, while internal teams had to step in to fill the gaps.

This friction blocked value at a critical moment, slowing time to impact and creating support bottlenecks for brands that needed more technical guidance. Streamlining these steps became essential to help brands launch faster and with confidence.

Screens illustrating the outdated Disco onboarding flow before redesign. Highlights issues like redundant pages, outdated inputs, and unclear guidance across setup steps. Used during the audit phase to identify friction points and inform the streamlined onboarding experience that reduced setup time and support needs.

Redesigning for clarity and control

We redesigned setup around clarity and control. Two dedicated paths now guide advertising and publishing, giving brands flexibility to launch at their own pace.
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Instead of rebuilding everything, we refined what worked, removed friction, and created an experience that feels faster and more intuitive.

Redesigned Disco brand setup flow showing separate onboarding, advertising, and publishing paths. Demonstrates a simplified, scalable system that removed outdated inputs, reduced manual support, and added platform-specific guidance. Highlights UX improvements for faster setup, clearer navigation, and stronger self-serve onboarding across ecommerce brand experiences.

Simplifying how brands get started

Each step was rethought to feel natural and intuitive. The new flow mirrors how brands actually work: selecting a platform, defining their profile, and choosing categories to power discovery. A clear confirmation now signals setup is complete and ready to grow.

Platform selection

Choose your commerce platform
Platform selection screen from Disco’s redesigned onboarding flow showing Shopify chosen as the commerce platform. Demonstrates a simplified setup step that guides brands to connect their store quickly, reducing friction and improving clarity in the ecommerce onboarding experience.

Brand profile setup

Add your logo and details
Brand profile screen from Disco’s redesigned onboarding flow showing how brands upload a logo and description. Demonstrates a clearer, more personalized setup experience that helps brands establish identity early and streamline ecommerce onboarding within the Disco platform

Category selection

Select your product categories
Category selection screen from Disco’s redesigned onboarding flow where brands choose main and subcategories. Demonstrates a clearer setup process that powers more accurate targeting, discovery, and partner recommendations within the ecommerce onboarding experience.

Welcome screen

Setup complete and ready to grow
Welcome screen from Disco’s redesigned onboarding flow confirming setup completion. Demonstrates a clearer transition into the next step, guiding brands to configure their DiscoFeed for growth while reinforcing confidence and progress through visual storytelling and ecommerce UX design.

Separating roles to unblock growth

As Disco expanded, a single control managed both advertising and publishing, creating confusion and frequent missteps. Brands with different goals followed the same path, forcing support teams to step in to fix errors and clarify intent.

Separating these roles became essential to reduce friction and help brands move forward independently.

Advertising and Publishing control

Shows how one button managed both actions
DiscoFeed management interface showing controls for enabling the feed, editing shop details, and previewing the mobile offer experience. Demonstrates dashboard UX, merchant tooling, and a unified ad and publishing workflow designed to improve clarity and control for brands.
Publishing controls showing confirmation states for enabling DiscoFeed and submitting products for review. Demonstrates clear system feedback and activation flow design that helps merchants understand the status of their feed and when their products go live.
Published state in the DiscoFeed dashboard showing an active feed and mobile preview of live shopper offers. Demonstrates system feedback, activation status, and merchant-facing controls that help brands understand when their feed is successfully published.

System logic breakdown

Highlights overlapping roles causing confusion
System diagram mapping the original advertising and publishing flow in Disco. Shows how one toggle triggered multiple conflicting paths and unclear states. Highlights UX issues that caused false activations, manual workarounds, and a five-step publish process that slowed setup and reduced trust.

Creating dedicated paths for setup

We redesigned setup around distinct paths for advertising and publishing so each brand could start based on its goals. Every step was simplified to feel self-guided and focused, with clearer feedback and streamlined inputs. The result was a faster, more scalable experience that reduced support needs.

Advertising flow

Helping brands grow their reach

Publishing flow

Helping brands monetize their post-purchase pages

Built to scale with brand needs

As new use cases emerged, setup became harder to navigate. We rebuilt flows to be clearer and more self-serve, anchored by progress states and responsive feedback. Distinct paths for advertising and publishing created a scalable foundation that reduced support needs and matched how brands grow.

Advertising overview

Defines where advertising begins
Advertising overview screen showing where brands begin creating offers to grow reach and conversions. Demonstrates improved ecommerce UX clarity with a cleaner layout, guided actions, and a preview of how offers appear in the DiscoFeed experience.

Publishing overview

Creates a dedicated publishing path
Publishing overview screen showing a redesigned management view where brands control exclusions and readiness before publishing. Demonstrates improved ecommerce UX clarity, with simplified options and guided feedback to help brands prepare their DiscoFeed setup independently and with confidence.

System feedback & UX infrastructure

Provides clearer in-product feedback
UI specification for a toast notification system showing single-line and two-line variants with actions, close controls, and status states. Demonstrates component design, interaction patterns, and system consistency for a scalable design system.
Banner component variants showing default, close, supporting text, and action patterns. Demonstrates scalable design system architecture, clear hierarchy, and reusable UI components used to communicate important updates across the product
Confirmation modals showing success states for advertising and publishing actions within Disco’s ad network. Demonstrates clear messaging, visual feedback, and system alignment to help brands understand activation status and next steps.

Removing blockers to move faster

We streamlined the platform to move faster. Features that slowed setup or caused confusion were removed, while non-essential projects were postponed to sharpen focus on core functionality.

By simplifying scope, we reduced friction, improved clarity, and built a stronger foundation for scalable growth.

Platform audit visuals showing removed and updated features across the Disco interface. Highlights a UX simplification process that reduced clutter, improved clarity, and aligned the product around faster setup and more focused ecommerce workflows for brands.

Collaboration that drove progress

We partnered with customer success to rebuild setup around real friction, focusing only on what brands needed to launch. Together, we streamlined sequencing, clarified priorities, and reduced confusion across flows.

When engineering capacity was limited, I prototyped and shipped improvements directly, introducing dynamic states and clearer documentation to maintain momentum and long-term clarity.

Mapping problems, challenges, and goals

Whiteboard session with Customer Success
Workshop diagram mapping customer pain points, business goals, and success metrics for Disco’s setup flow. Shows how the team defined friction areas like confusion and delayed setup, clarified what success looked like, and aligned design priorities with customer success insights to guide the redesign.

Integration component states

Dynamic UI shipped to bridge technical setup gaps
Integration setup screen for Disco showing how different platform types, including Shopify and non-Shopify stores, connect to publish or advertise. Highlights a redesigned integration flow with clearer system feedback, step-by-step guidance, and developer tools to support flexible ecommerce setup and reduce onboarding friction.

A more scalable foundation

The redesigned setup removed friction and reduced support needs, giving brands a faster, clearer path to launch.

By focusing only on essential steps, the experience became easier to complete and scale. Refined feedback patterns and consistent UI modernized every interaction and empowered brands to self-serve with confidence.

Comparison table showing the old and new onboarding systems for Disco. Highlights how the redesigned setup removed blockers, clarified advertiser and publisher roles, added in-product guidance, and aligned visuals to the design system to create a faster, more scalable, and self-serve onboarding experience.

Credits