Curio Studio — Project Management SaaS

Curio Studio is a boutique creative agency in Barcelona specialising in brand identity and digital campaigns for mid-sized European clients. With a team of 12 and an average of 8 active projects at any time, they were operating across five different tools: a project tracker in Notion, invoices in Excel, contracts in Google Drive, client communication in email, and time tracking in a separate app.

The Problem

The founder came to me with a specific problem: they were consistently undercharging clients because nobody had a clear view of how many hours had actually gone into a project. By the time invoices went out, the data was scattered, approximate, or missing entirely.

• No single view of project status, budget consumed, and time remaining
• Senior creatives were spending 30–40 minutes per week manually reconciling hours from different sources
• Clients regularly asked "where are we?" — and getting an answer required pulling from 3 different tools
• Invoice preparation was a 2-hour process per project, done monthly by the operations manager

My Role

I designed a custom project management SaaS for their internal use — from research and IA through to high-fidelity prototype and usability testing. The brief was intentionally narrow: replace the five tools with one dashboard that gave everyone the same view of reality.

I ran structured interviews with four roles: the founder, a senior designer, the account manager, and the operations manager. Each had a completely different relationship with the existing tools and different definitions of "knowing how a project is going."

Key insight: the same question, four different answers

When I asked "how do you know if a project is on track?" — every person described a different mental model and a different set of data sources. The tool had to work for all four simultaneously without adding complexity for any of them.

One dashboard, every answer

1. Project Overview Card

Each project had a single overview showing: client name, project phase, budget consumed vs. total, hours logged vs. estimated, next milestone, and assigned team. At a glance, anyone in the agency could answer a client status question in under 10 seconds.

2. Integrated Time Logging

I designed a lightweight time-logging flow directly within the project — a simple timer or manual entry, linked to a specific task and team member. No separate app, no exports. Hours flowed directly into the budget calculation.

3. Budget & Invoice Automation

When hours were logged, the budget tracker updated automatically. I designed an invoice generation flow that pulled all logged work, formatted it into a client-ready summary, and pre-filled the invoice fields. The operations manager's 2-hour monthly process became a 10-minute one.

4. Client View (Read-only Link)

A stripped-down, read-only view that could be shared with clients via a link — showing project phase, upcoming milestones, and deliverables. This eliminated the "where are we?" email entirely.

• Flexibility vs. structure: Creative agencies resist rigid systems. I kept the project structure minimal — phases and milestones were optional, not mandatory — so the tool felt like it adapted to them, not the other way around.
• Over-engineering risk: The temptation was to add everything: chat, file sharing, client approvals. We deliberately scoped those out and focused on the core loop: time in → budget out → invoice generated.
• Adoption: I ran a Maze usability test with 3 team members mid-prototype. Two tasks failed — time logging and invoice generation. I redesigned both flows before final delivery.

• The team onboarded to the prototype in a single session — the simplified structure matched how they already thought about projects.
• The integrated budget tracker meant undercharging became visible in real time, not at invoice time.
• The client-facing view reduced status-update emails significantly, freeing account manager time for higher-value work.