When I joined Glean in January, the Glean community was entirely housed within Slack. We had just purchased a new community tool, Higher Logic Vanilla but had not begun the implementation process. Our goal? Launch our customer community, the Gleaniverse, at our first-ever user conference, Glean:GO, on May 20th. That meant the entire site needed to be designed, built, tested, and published in just a few months.
Our internal design team created incredible character illustrations for the event, and they immediately became my north star for the community’s look and feel. We made the launch deadline in May, but the first version of the Gleaniverse was functional at best. It was clunky, unintuitive, and didn’t reflect the vibrant energy of our brand. With no budget, no extra hands, and a strong desire to give our customers a better experience ASAP, I rolled up my sleeves and dove into a full redesign.
