INSITU
Reducing time to first insight from hours to under 3 minutes
As Founding Designer at Insitu, I redesigned the core reporting experience to help brands understand which ads drive performance.
ROLE
Founding Designer
TIMELINE
2 weeks
CHALLENGE
Reduce time-to-insight by making it faster to create, find and revisit the reports that matter most.
Smarter Insights.
Better Creative.
Insitu helps brands understand which ads and creative actually drive performance across paid social (Meta and Tiktok). The team consisted of two founders, three engineers, a PM, and myself (Founding Designer).
Context
Insitu's MVP was showing early promise. Users who built reports kept coming back, and session times showed genuine engagement. But retention data told a more uncomfortable story: too many users weren't making it far enough to see that value.
As Founding Designer, addressing this became an urgent priority. Losing users before they reached their first insight wasn't just a UX problem, it was a commercial risk that would make scaling the product harder. We knew we had something good. The challenge was making sure anyone, regardless of their use case, could find out what they needed quickly enough to feel it too.
The problem
Our MVP proved valuable (58% of users who built a report returned within a week, and average session times exceeded 45 minutes).
However, it still took 2–3 hours to reach a first insight, delaying activation and obscuring the product’s value.
Considerations
Tight two-week deadline (including testing)
The solution should have the biggest impact for the least effort
Changes should be intuitive and self-serve, without requiring guided onboarding or user education
Reports vs Analyse
In our MVP the navigation at the top of the screen allowed users to switch between two types of reporting.
Reports let users browse and filter ads by time, performance, or attributes.
Analyse offered deeper, pivot-table-style breakdowns and more advanced functionality.
Side bar concept
I explored how we might allow users to manage their reports from the sidebar. While tidy when collapsed, this area held so much core functionality it was effectively always open, reducing space for ads and undermining our visual-first experience. For this reason, I ruled it out. Sacrificing screen real estate for organisation wasn't a trade-off worth making.
The ‘Saved’ tab
I explored adding a 'Saved' tab to the top-level navigation. However, navigating to it pulled users out of context, and it became clear that users already struggled to distinguish between the Reports and Analyse sections. Adding a third tab would have compounded an existing navigation problem rather than solved it.
Starting point
Our default view showed Live Meta ads from the past two weeks, but users needed to build reports quickly rather than start from an unclear baseline. To avoid slowing them down (since the goal was faster time to insight) I added an empty report state that provided guidance while keeping the process efficient.
Home concept
I designed a “Home” concept where users could land when they log in. It features a primary CTA to create a report and template reports surfaced in cards supported by visuals.
Our testing revealed a small set of common reports that most users wanted to create. This highlighted an opportunity to provide ready-made templates, reserving custom report building for more complex, bespoke needs.
The primary CTA brings the key decision upfront, helping users choose a report type with clear explanations while using progressive disclosure to avoid overwhelming them.
The ‘Open’ CTA in the top navigation provides quick access to existing reports from anywhere, balancing guided task initiation with fast access for returning users.
The decision
After exploring and ruling out the sidebar and saved tab concepts, the Home screen emerged as the clearest path forward. It was lightweight to build, which mattered given our two-week deadline, and it addressed the core problems in one place: a primary CTA that simplified report creation, template cards for the reports users were repeatedly building from scratch, quick access to recently edited reports, and a simplified top-level navigation.
It also gave us room to grow, as the layout could accommodate new content without a structural rethink. Most importantly, every decision in the Home concept was in service of the same goal: getting users to their first insight as fast as possible.
Future proofing
I designed the Home area in a way which could allow for more content to be added in the future. This concept shows how we could add Creative Recommendations below our reporting templates.
An additional feature
I added a one-click “copy ad view” feature (a top user request) to replace time-consuming screen grabs, letting users paste views directly into presentations.
Introducing report templates created an opportunity to suggest commonly used templates at the moment a user creates a new report.
Made with AI
I collaborated with an engineer to rapidly prototype an AI-driven chatbot that allows users to generate reports using a simple text prompt, removing the need to manually navigate report setup. For example, a user could type: “Show my best-performing video ads based on ROAS in the last week on Meta.”
This was deprioritised due to complexity, but it was the next major feature we released.
Some final designs showcasing the new navigation and ‘Home’ screen.
Building on the positive results outlined below, I updated our website with refreshed images and videos to better support our content.
What I’d do differently
In hindsight, I underestimated the scope of the problem. Time-to-insight wasn't just about report creation. The navigation needed to change too, and that had more knock-on effects than I initially anticipated. Given a longer runway, I'd have pushed back on the two-week constraint and addressed both more thoroughly from the start.
The feature I wish we'd prioritised sooner was the AI chatbot. When we did ship it, it transformed how quickly users could build and edit reports. Looking back, there's an argument for reframing the product around a prompt-first experience entirely. We invested heavily in self-serve tools for building complex reports, but I suspect many of our users would have been happy to hand that complexity to the platform. That's the version of the product I'd want to explore.
Results
Rolled out to all 21 orgs on time
Reduced time to first insight from hours to under 3 minutes
Week-one retention improved from 58% to 79%. Improving week-one retention by 21% generated an estimated £181,440 in additional ARR annually, based on retaining 4.2 more customers per month.
0 organisations reverted to the “classic view”
We set out to reduce time to insight. We went from hours to under three minutes.