The Challenge

Move quickly with confidence

Pella, an Iowa-based and family-owned company founded in 1925, has a long history of designing and manufacturing beautiful custom doors and windows. But moving the sales process of these thoughtful pieces online proved to be difficult — products were highly configurable, with nuanced pricing, configuration rules, and a blend of digital and in-person steps.

Yet they had only one internal UX designer to support multiple teams. Engineering was waiting on designs. Stakeholders were waiting on “proof” that UX decisions would work. And the e-commerce team had been looking at the same flows for so long that it was hard to see what wasn’t working anymore. The team was stuck in a familiar pattern: a small internal UX function, a long backlog, and a lot of opinions—without the research, capacity, or design operations rigor to move quickly with confidence.

The result: UX was perceived as a bottleneck in the product development pipeline, and strategic questions about the long-term omni-channel experience fell into the backlog abyss.

The Work

Here’s how we helped Pella

What started as a review of their current experience, conducting a heuristic analysis across the customer journey, quickly shifted into our team entering as an embedded set of UX design partners focused on design operations and delivery: increasing throughput, improving UX quality, alleviating pressure, and building a foundation for strategic data-driven decision-making.

Key activities:

Refreshing the experience with a new set of eyes

Because we weren’t tied to the original implementation, we could approach the experience with curiosity and an unbiased, expert lens.

Our role was equal parts UX design and strategic mirror: we reflected back patterns that had become invisible to the team over time and re-framed them in terms of customer trust, effort, and clarity. This fresh lens is one of the most powerful benefits of an embedded design team derived from a third-party.

Scaling from one designer to a functioning UX team

From our initial findings, we created a roadmap that prioritized the work to be done. We then teamed up with the single in-house designer to collaborate with product and engineering leadership and define where UX capacity would have the greatest impact.

Over time, we became a hiring partner. We developed interview protocols, co-facilitated conversations with candidates, and reviewed portfolios with an eye toward real-world problem-solving, not just polished screens. Throughout the process, we acted as a sounding board for leaders as they weighed strengths, gaps, and long-term team fit. Our emphasis was on finding talent that are “Humble, Hungry, and Smart”, a concept championed in Patrick Lencioni’s book, “The Ideal Team Player”. The result was hiring two new full-time designers—tripling the size of the internal UX team—both of whom continue to thrive and elevate the organization’s design maturity today.

The UX team grew from one to five designers at its peak, a blend of (newly hired) internal designers and Visual Logic, each aligned to key parts of the business. This shifted UX from a single-point bottleneck to a distributed, coordinated team with shared patterns and collaboration rituals. It also created room for deeper UX work—rather than constant firefighting.

This is when design operations became essential: shared templates, design reviews, collaborative problem solving and predictable ceremonies gave the team a common standard of quality without slowing them down.

“[Visual Logic] was an extension of our team— There have not been many 3P solutions I have worked with that I cared for as deeply as my team. They engaged, brought ideas, and were just as passionate as our FTE.”

Rebecca Hicks Director of Digital Transformation, previously E-Commerce Product Manager

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Bringing structure to UX research and validation

Before our engagement, user research was ad-hoc and most often skipped due to time pressure and a lack of resources. There wasn’t an emphasis on “evidence-based decision making”, as such there was no repeatable way to generate it.

We helped the team:

• Stand up usability testing for high-risk flows

• Integrate and conduct concept validation early in the design cycle

• Create simple, reusable research plans, protocols, and discussion guides

• Translate research findingsinto stakeholder-ready narratives and visuals

• Champion long-term customer researchto support business initiatives

Over time, stakeholders didn’t just accept research—they started asking for it. Product managers and leaders began requesting user validation as a standard input into decisions, using findings to make the case for design directions with executives and cross-functional partners.

This shift elevated UX research from a “nice to have” to a core part of product strategy, outside of analytics support.

Supporting delivery, scaling maturity, and shaping key initiatives

Throughout our 2-year engagement, our role expanded and we stepped into several adjacent responsibilities that strengthened delivery quality and long-term UX capability across the organization.

These efforts represent only a portion of the work completed over our engagement. The scope and pace of activity reached far beyond what a single case study can fully capture, reinforcing how deeply integrated our team became in moving both the product and the organization’s UX maturity forward.

“VL is a delight to work with— based on your teams preference, they will incorporate themselves into existing processes or own stand-alone. Communication is a strong suite— never once did team go over hours or budget; there were times we approached our limit but transparency was key.”

Rebecca Hicks Director of Digital Transformation, previously E-Commerce Product Manager

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Why an external perspective can change everything

For executives and product leaders wrestling with similar challenges, three reflections stand out: