Case study — 03 / SoftSuite HR
Improving enterprise subscription management
Subscription decisions took admins five minutes of manual arithmetic and a support ticket. Surfacing cost per user upfront and collapsing workflows into contextual actions made subscription health readable at a glance.
Add a module, change the license count.
Upgrade Subscription
PaperSoft Limited · 470 staff on the system
Licences
500
470 of 500 seats used · 94%
Payment frequency
Cost per user / month
₦4,500
- System Administrator₦4,500
- × 500 licences ₦2,250,000
Due today
₦2,250,000
Prorated from today · renews 12 Jan 2026
- Year
- 2024
- Role
- SaaS, Web App, Enterprise Design
- Client
- SoftSUITE — enterprise HR platform
- Users
- 500+ admins, orgs of 50–5,000 staff
- Scope
- Subscription and licence management
- Outcome
- 5+ min → glanceable — to price a subscription change
What was wrong
What the old experience made people do
01
The price of a decision was hidden inside it
Three tiers displayed as totals with no monthly cost per user, and the differences between them written into paragraph descriptions rather than laid out to compare. Choosing a plan meant doing arithmetic first and guessing second — roughly 5 minutes of it, per the support load.
Fixed by leading with cost per user per month, and keeping a running total live while the choices are still being made.
02
Utilisation had to be interpreted, not read
Licence usage sat in a bare progress bar with no figure attached, while renewal date, expiry and activity were scattered across the page. Answering “are we about to run out of seats” meant opening three screens and holding the answers in your head.
Fixed by three stat cards carrying the figures the page is actually opened for, each with its own unit and window underneath.
03
Routine jobs were buried in a settings maze
Changing a company logo meant scrolling past colour pickers, timezone and security controls — 20+ unrelated fields competing equally on one page. The upload box never showed which logo was currently live, so you could not even confirm you had succeeded.
Fixed by separating unrelated jobs into their own tabs, and putting the current logo inside the control that replaces it.
04
Every routine task generated a support ticket
An interface that needs training is a cost that recurs for every new admin, at 500+ of them and rising. The tickets were not evidence of unusual users; they were the interface working exactly as designed.
Fixed by moving the answer to where the question is asked, so the common tasks stop requiring the knowledge that a ticket was buying.
The context
Software that assumed you had been trained on it
500+ admins running multi-module subscriptions for organisations of 50–5,000 staff.
The interface was not broken. Every capability an administrator needed was present and worked, which is exactly why the problem had survived: nothing on a feature list was missing, so nothing showed up as a defect.
What it cost was measured elsewhere — in onboarding time for each new admin, in support tickets for tasks that should have been self-evident, and in the number of screens between a question and its answer.
Enterprise software is allowed to be complex. It is not allowed to make you do the arithmetic.
The challenge
Surface what matters without removing anything
The obvious move with an overloaded enterprise tool is to simplify by subtraction, and it is usually unavailable: every field belongs to somebody’s workflow, and the admin who needs the obscure one needs it badly.
So the constraint was to keep the whole surface area and change only what the interface leads with — which turns the problem from what to remove into what to answer first.
The solution
Answer first, then let the detail sit underneath
The hierarchy now leads with the figure the page exists to produce: cost per user, seats remaining, days to renewal. The supporting detail did not go anywhere — it sits below the answer instead of in place of it.
The multi-step flows collapsed the same way. A routine task is a contextual action inside the view that raised it, rather than a journey into settings, and the running total updates while the decision is being made rather than after it.
Decision 01
Pricing that answers the question upfront
Subscription decisions required 5+ minutes of manual calculation and frequent “What’s the difference?” support tickets. The redesign leads with monthly cost per user, so the comparison is already made by the time the admin arrives.
Decision 02
Traffic-light subscription health
A simple color system lets an admin judge the state of a subscription without reading a single number — the check that used to require opening three screens.
Decision 03
Routine tasks, out of the settings maze
Simple tasks like “change company logo” required navigating through 20+ unrelated form fields. Task-based navigation pulls them into the primary view.
The screens
3 surfaces, one decision each
Toggle each pair. The rebuilt screen is the resting state, because it is the one that has to hold up.
Subscription
Decision
Put the cost where the decision is being made
Three tiers displayed as ₦4X,XXX,XXX with no monthly cost per user, and the feature differences written into paragraph descriptions rather than laid out to compare. Choosing a plan meant doing arithmetic first and guessing second.
The rebuild keeps a running total visible while the choices are being made, so the number updates as modules and licences change instead of arriving at the end.
License management
Decision
Make subscription health readable from across the room
Licence utilisation sat in a bare progress bar that had to be interpreted, and renewal date, expiry and usage were scattered across the page with no single status view.
Three stat cards now carry the figures an admin actually opens this page for, each with its own unit and window underneath. Payment methods moved up from four clicks deep into the same view.
System settings
Decision
Give each routine task its own surface
Changing a logo meant scrolling past colour pickers, timezone and security controls, all competing equally on a single page — and the upload box never showed which logo was currently live.
Four tabs separate the unrelated jobs, and the current logo sits in the control that replaces it. The task that used to require navigating 20+ fields is now one panel.
Still open
What I would do in the next pass
The claims here are unmeasured
The 5 minutes and the ticket volume came from the client’s account of the old flow, not from instrumentation, and nothing was measured after. The redesign is defensible on its reasoning; it is not yet defensible on evidence, and those are different things.
Nothing was designed for the org that outgrows its plan
The subscription flow handles adding seats. It does not handle the harder moment — hitting the ceiling mid-month with staff who cannot log in — which is when the admin most needs the interface to be clear and is least able to read carefully.
Permissions were out of scope and shouldn’t have been
Who is allowed to change a subscription is a subscription question. It was treated as a separate security concern and left alone, which means the redesigned flow assumes every admin looking at it is allowed to press the button.
Nothing was taken away. The interface just stopped making its users assemble the answer themselves.