When redesign becomes rebrand
PRACTISE 1
Most case studies end with a redesigned product. This one doesn't. After almost a year of research and design on Sodexo's benefit-finder Můjpass.cz, the team shipped a rebrand instead of the redesign I had spent months preparing. That outcome surprised me at the time. Looking back, it's the most honest thing the project could have done.
Speculative
Futurism
Design challenge
IKEA
The brief, and what it actually meant
Můjpass.cz is the public directory where Sodexo (now Pluxee) employees find places to spend their meal vouchers. Restaurants, pharmacies, gyms, thousands of merchants on a map. The brief was clean on paper: make the merchant finder easier to use, and surface relevant merchants to grow revenue. Two goals, easy to nod at, harder to reconcile. Easier orientation points toward less clutter.
More revenue often points the other way, toward more merchants visible and more sponsored placements. I wrote both down and kept them next to each other for the rest of the project, because at some point I knew they were going to disagree.
Discovery: confirming what I already suspected
I started with Service Safari, pretending to be an HR manager looking for somewhere to take colleagues for lunch. The map clustered into useless numbers. Filters narrowed by axes I couldn't figure out. Stock photos didn't match the merchants.
Personal observations are hypotheses, not findings, so I ran internal interviews. Sales didn't want anyone touching the merchant database, its size was the sales pitch, even if half of it didn't work. Development confirmed technical limits and stalled improvement attempts.Customer Support's complaint patterns matched my Safari notes almost word for word.
This is the lesson I keep relearning: the visible problem on a product is rarely just a design problem. Můjpass wasn't broken because nobody had thought about UX. It was broken because three teams had three incentives, and the product was the compromise.
The analytics closed the loop. Half of users used filters at all. The "find merchants near me" feature, the one I would have bet was the killer use case, was used by 1.5%. The product I was redesigning wasn't being used the way anyone inside assumed it was.
The decision I didn't make
When I presented the final design, development split the estimate into two phases: rebrand and redesign. The decision was to ship phase one and pause phase two. The underlying system was old enough that a real redesign meant rebuilding the technical foundation, and the company couldn't commit to that during the Sodexo to Pluxee transition.
The cancelled redesign is still on my desktop. It's a better product than what's live today.
What I learned
A design process doesn't end when the design is good. It ends when the organisation is ready to ship it. On this project, those moments didn't line up, and the research is exactly what made it clear that a redesign without rebuilding the system would be cosmetic. It's the process working, even when the result isn't what I came in hoping for.
© MUNI
(WDX® — 02)
Design
I help companies shape their digital strategy from the ground up. Through audits, service design, and workshop facilitation, I turn complex requirements into clear, functional solutions.
2025 - 2026 ©
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