Case Study Ninety.io 2023 – 2025

Ninety Mobile: From Zero to Apple’s Top 100

How I drove the discovery, vision, and design of Ninety’s first mobile app — trading feature parity for user value, and landing in Apple’s Top 100 Business Apps.

Top 100
Ranked in Apple’s Top 100 Business Apps
52%
Of active users adopted mobile within 90 days — 3× expected
78%
Core task completion per session
40%
Monthly returning users
Two floating iPhones: one showing the Ninety app on a home screen alongside other business apps, the other showing the Ninety App Store listing with a 4.9-star rating and the app's morning dashboard of to-dos, issues, rocks, and milestones.
Ninety Mobile in the App Store — a 4.9-star rating and a home screen built around what needs attention today.

The design decision

Define the mobile experience around useful actions, rather than desktop feature parity.

Explore the mobile strategy ↓

Overview

The case for mobile started with the data

Ninety is a business operating system that leadership teams live in — goals, to-dos, issues, and meetings. But it only existed on desktop. I spearheaded the initial discovery for a mobile experience after compiling usage data and customer feedback that showed an urgent need for a native app or PWA.

The voice of the customer was blunt:

“I would like to say that this tool is outstanding. However, the lack of notifications and the mobile app are annoying… without an app, this software is not versatile.”

Users were managing real work on the go — and the product wasn’t there. The opportunity was to design an intuitive, action-driven mobile experience tailored to those on-the-go workflows, not a shrunken copy of the desktop.

The Problem

Feature parity was the trap. User value was the strategy.

The instinctive brief for a first mobile app is “put the product on a phone.” That would have failed: Ninety’s desktop surface is broad and dense, built for planning sessions and leadership meetings — not for the thirty seconds someone has between meetings.

I drove a strategic shift from feature parity to user value. The mobile experience would prioritize:

What needs attention now — personal to-dos, issues, and rocks that are overdue or due soon, surfaced first.
What to do next — guiding users toward the highest-value action instead of presenting an unprioritized wall of data.
Capture on the go — making it effortless to create to-dos and issues the moment they come up, so nothing waits for a desk.
End-to-end product design

My Role

I led design for the app from discovery through ship, working with the Head of Product, two product managers, and the engineering team:

Vision & UX strategy — Drove the product vision, the parity-to-value reframe, and the design execution for Ninety’s first mobile app.
Mobile-first design system — Designed a mobile design system from scratch for both iOS and Android, building on the Terra foundations.
Research through QA — Led user research, wireframes, prototypes, visual design, and design QA — the full lifecycle.
Cross-functional collaboration — Partnered with Product, Engineering, and Customer Success throughout, keeping the customer signal in the loop from discovery to launch.

Discovery

Interviews, themes, and two personas to design for

I conducted semi-structured interviews with current customers about how they worked away from their desks, then synthesized the sessions in Dovetail to identify the recurring themes. The analysis produced two primary personas that anchored every scope decision — each with distinct contexts, frequencies, and jobs that mobile needed to serve.

User persona one: Greg, with goals, frustrations, and mobile usage context.
User persona two: Amira, with goals, frustrations, and mobile usage context.

The two primary personas from discovery research. Click to view full size.

Design Strategy

An action-driven experience, not a dashboard on a phone

The app opens to what matters today: a personalized morning view of overdue and upcoming to-dos, issues, and rocks. The feed keeps users connected to team activity — mentions, comments, completions — and a persistent create action means capturing a to-do or raising an issue takes seconds from anywhere in the app.

A person holding an iPhone showing the Ninety mobile feed: mentions, comments, and completed discussions from teammates, with bottom navigation for My90, To-Dos, Issues, Rocks, and People.
The feed — team activity, mentions, and a persistent create action, one thumb away.
Animated walkthrough of the Ninety mobile app interface on a phone.
The app in motion.
Validate cheap, commit with confidence

Testing & Validation

I mapped the user journey flows and designed unmoderated usability tests (Useberry) to validate the core flows before engineering committed. Results went back to stakeholders, and we chose the highest-impact approach the team could actually resource — an explicit trade-off conversation rather than a scope that quietly ballooned.

The toolkit across the project: Figma and FigJam for design and workshops, Dovetail for research synthesis, Useberry for unmoderated testing, Gainsight for customer signal, and Jira and Slack for delivery.

Outcomes & Recognition

Shipped, adopted, and ranked

52%
Of active users adopted mobile within 90 days — 3× the expected rate
78%
Core task completion per session — people finish what they open the app to do
40%
Monthly returning users — mobile became a habit, not a novelty

The app shipped to both the App Store and Google Play, and was ranked in Apple’s Top 100 Business Apps. For a first mobile release from a desktop-only B2B product, the adoption curve validated the central bet: immediacy over parity.

What this project taught me

Key Learnings

Designing mobile-first means prioritizing immediacy, not parity

The most important decisions were about what not to build. Every desktop feature we declined to port was room for the mobile experience to be faster, clearer, and more focused on the moment of use. When launching something new, the discipline of the cut list matters as much as the feature list.

The adoption numbers also confirmed something I now carry into every project: clarity at every UX layer drives adoption. A focused home screen, an obvious next action, and frictionless capture did more for engagement than any individual feature would have.

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