Kittl: Beyond the Dashboard
Reversing a 40% traffic and a conversion cliff by redefining the AI-first creative suite
By mid-2025, Kittl was suffering an identity crisis. Behind the scenes, the product had evolved from a niche Print-on-Demand tool for side-hustlers into a powerhouse AI-first creative suite. But our public "front door" hadn't caught up.
Between April and July, conversion to free users plummeted due a drop in traffic of 40%. We weren't just losing signups; we were losing the narrative. The traffic was shifting, and the homepage was failing to communicate our new value proposition.
My Role
I led the UX and strategic redesign of the Kittl homepage. Partnering closely with the Growth team and Leadership, I designed and ran a series of high-stakes experiments from August to November 2025 to overhaul our messaging, rebuild our visual assets, and recover our baseline conversion rate.
The Challenge
How do you explain an ecosystem of AI tools, mockups, and templates to a completely new audience without overwhelming them?
Our objective was three-fold:
- Stop the bleeding: Recover the lost conversion rate.
- Shift the paradigm: Clearly communicate the pivot to an AI-first suite.
- Bridge the gap: Streamline access to Kittl's vast content library without causing choice paralysis.
The Friction: The Dashboard Deadlock
Every major design initiative has its battleground. Ours was the fundamental layout of the homepage.
The Growth team and I had compiled enough evidence to form a clear hypothesis: New users need to see the value before they see the content. We wanted a narrative-driven page that explained what we do and why we do it.
Leadership, however, held a very different, highly opinionated view. They believed the homepage should mimic the in-product experience, dropping users immediately into an infinite scroll of templates, essentially a "logged-out dashboard."
We launched the dashboard variant. While it made perfect sense to existing power users, the metrics quickly confirmed our fears: new users were bouncing and all the other metrics remained stale. It was the wrong move.
The Discovery: "Just Another Canva"
Armed with the data from the failed dashboard experiment, we finally got the green light to test the in-product style against a more traditional, value-first marketing approach.
Concurrently, I initiated a series of 5-second tests and navigation tests using a user research platform. This was met with resistance; Leadership initially viewed this as a waste of time. However, these rapid tests uncovered a massive perception gap that changed the trajectory of the project.
The Insight: New users didn't understand how our AI features improved their workflows. Worse, without clear messaging, they assumed Kittl was "just another Canva."
We realized we couldn't just show templates; we had to demonstrate capability.
The Compromise: Sexy but Trustworthy
As the design shifted toward a marketing-led approach, Leadership voiced a new concern: the page felt "stale and boring." They wanted the vibrant, dynamic energy of the editor reflected on the homepage.
This led to a highly collaborative sprint with Leadership to entirely rethink the hero section. We needed visual assets above the fold that felt incredibly "sexy" to capture attention, yet remained a highly trustworthy representation of our actual design editor—avoiding the trap of heavily doctored marketing mockups that break user trust upon signup.
The Solution: The Ecosystem Strategy
The winning variant moved away from the infinite scroll and embraced structured storytelling.
- The Anchor: A crystal-clear CTA ("Start creating") positioned strategically above the fold, supported by dynamic assets that proved our capabilities instantly.
- The Ecosystem Tabs: Instead of overwhelming users with everything at once, we introduced a tabbed layout based on the use-cases our research proved resonated most (AI design, templates, mockup creation, flows, etc.). Users could now self-select their journey.
- Dual-Angle Social Proof: We integrated heavy social proof, balancing both the inspirational (jaw-dropping designs created by users) and the rational (trust metrics and community size) to build immediate credibility.
The Impact
By October 2025, our final "Product-First" variant was declared the clear winner, successfully reversing the downward trend and establishing a new baseline for Kittl's growth.
- +10.2% Increase in Conversion to Signup.
- +4.84% Increase in Template Usage.
- 7.62% Reduction in Bounce Rate.
More importantly, we successfully aligned the company around a validated narrative: Kittl was no longer just a template library; it was the internet's most powerful AI creative suite.
Feel free to take a closer look at each of the variants tested here: