How We Designed the New Ardoq Experience

The New Ardoq Experience introduces a simpler, smarter, more powerful platform and lays the foundation for a new way of working with Enterprise Architecture across the organization.

While we’ve shared the thinking behind why we redesigned the Ardoq experience to reduce friction and improve usability, this conversation focuses on how it all came together.

Long before we set out to redesign the core Ardoq journeys, we started to see a consistent pattern in how customers used Ardoq.

They were achieving a lot with the platform: solving complex problems, building powerful models, and driving real outcomes.

But getting there often required more effort than it should have.

Not because the capability wasn’t there, but because the path to those insights wasn’t always clear.

In this conversation, our Head of Product Design, Damjan Obal, and Senior UX Researcher, India Anderson, join CMO Sunny Dhami to share how research and design shaped the New Ardoq Experience - from early insights to the decisions that defined it.

The Pattern We Kept Seeing: Challenging Journeys from Data to Insights

Ardoq has always been built for depth, capable of modeling complex systems and delivering meaningful insights. But as the platform evolved, so did expectations around how easily that value could be accessed.

As the team observed:

“We see our customers achieve so much with Ardoq, but in so many creative ways. And as a designer, that's not a great thing to see.”

- Damjan Obal, Head of Product Design

The pieces were there. The insights were there. But navigating the product and moving from data to action wasn’t always intuitive, especially for users outside of the core architecture team.

When Power Doesn’t Scale

One of the key challenges wasn’t the lack of capability, but how that capability translated across the organization.

Ardoq’s flexibility allowed power users to achieve a lot but that flexibility didn’t always scale to a broader audience.

“We’ve seen a lot of what we call ‘Peter Parker moments’ with our customers. We give them great power, but it comes with great responsibility.” Damjan says.

We observed that power users often took on the responsibility of structuring and maintaining the data for others. Over time, this led to more manual effort, more context switching, and ultimately less engagement from the wider business.

Rethinking Complexity

A key insight from the research was that complexity itself wasn’t something to remove. It’s inherent to the environments Ardoq is designed to support.

“Customers don’t need Ardoq to be a complex tool. They need it to be flexible enough to help them deal with complexity.”

- India Anderson, Senior UX Researcher

This distinction shaped our approach to the redesign.

Instead of simplifying the problem space, the focus shifted toward structuring complexity in a way that makes it easier to navigate, understand, and act on.

Looking Beyond Individual Pain Points

To make that shift, the team expanded how research was used across the organization.

Rather than relying solely on traditional user testing, insights were gathered and connected from multiple sources.

As India explains: “We try to triangulate all of these insights so we can identify patterns and actually lift the experience across the entire product.”

This included direct user research, feedback from customer-facing teams, and real-world usage patterns.

The goal wasn’t just to address individual pain points, but to improve the experience in a way that would work consistently across different users and use cases.

Designing for Decisions

One of the guiding principles behind the new experience is that Ardoq is a tool for making decisions.

Not just modeling systems or visualizing data, but enabling users to take action with confidence.

This led to a shift in how the product is structured.

Instead of exposing all capabilities upfront, the experience now focuses on guiding users toward outcomes, providing just enough context to help them move forward.

Balancing Simplicity With Flexibility

A critical part of the redesign was ensuring that improving usability didn’t come at the cost of flexibility.

“We are not dumbing down Ardoq. We are peeling away complexity.”

- Damjan Obal

This meant designing for different types of users at the same time: those who build and structure data, and those who consume and act on it.

By focusing on shared goals and introducing structure where it adds value, the new experience makes it easier for both groups to work within the platform.

Designing for an AI-First Way of Working

While many of these changes are visible in the interface, they also reflect a broader change in how the product is evolving.

A more structured and guided experience doesn’t just improve usability, it creates the foundation for what this enables.

As we highlighted earlier, the future of Enterprise Architecture is increasingly shaped by AI. But meaningful AI doesn’t start with the interface. It starts with the quality and structure of the data behind it.

That’s why designing for an AI-driven future requires more than adding new capabilities. It requires clear data foundations, consistent structure, and experiences that make it easier to understand and act on that data.

By introducing more guided workflows, clearer navigation, and improved data foundations, the platform is better positioned to support more advanced use cases - from personalized experiences to AI-supported insights and decision-making.

It’s not just about making Ardoq easier to use today, but about enabling a more scalable and intelligent way of working with architecture over time.

Explore the New Ardoq Experience

Watch the full interview here.

If you want to go deeper into what’s new and how it works in practice, explore the New Ardoq experience.