PaperCut Partner Portal

PaperCut's partners — resellers, support technicians, marketing teams across Singapore, the UK and Australia — relied on the portal for collateral, manuals, training and certifications. But finding anything meant knowing where it already lived, and the previous portal was built in PHP: editors had to open an IDE and edit Bootstrap classes by hand to change a line of text.

Two different user groups were stuck. Partners couldn't find things. PaperCut's own teams couldn't fix that without a developer.

I ran eight interviews with partners across three markets — marketing directors, sales analysts, support technicians — and built three personas and journey maps for the two scenarios that came up in every conversation: a client has asked for collateral, and a reseller needs a manual.

The research pointed hard at navigation. Almost every participant said global search would change their workflow; the existing collateral filters were barely used. So I rebuilt the information architecture around finding rather than browsing, prototyped it, and validated the structure over three rounds of usability testing before a single screen was finished.

I built the portal's design system on PaperCut's own product foundations, so the portal reads as part of their wider brand rather than a bolt-on — then designed the collateral library, order forms and sales databases on top of it.

Monthly visits rose from around 15,000 to 18,200 after launch. Five PaperCut teams now manage their own areas of the portal, with 25+ active editors publishing directly — no developer in the loop. Partners gave direct, unprompted feedback on how much easier it is to use.