Case Study · Qive (former Arquivei)
Led the structural overhaul of Qive (former Arquivei)'s navigation — from design-led initiative through stakeholder alignment, usability validation, and progressive rollout.
Qive (former Arquivei) is Brazil's largest fiscal document automation and management SaaS platform — serving over 100,000 SMB and Enterprise companies and processing 30% of all B2B fiscal documents in the country.
As the platform expanded, the navigation evolved without a consistent structure. New modules were added independently by different teams, causing the experience to reflect the company's internal organization rather than the user's workflow.
This was a design-led initiative. I identified the problem, framed the business case, and aligned product and engineering stakeholders around the need for structural change.
Because the redesign would affect every product entry point, we validated the proposal through usability testing before development started. The initiative later became part of the company's 2024 structural roadmap.
The navigation issues were not visual — they were structural.
Users had to know what a feature was called to find it, instead of navigating based on what they were trying to accomplish.
For the business, every new feature added additional complexity to an already fragile system.
Design a navigation system organized around how users think about their work — while creating a scalable structure capable of supporting future product expansion.
Before proposing a new structure, we mapped the existing navigation patterns across the platform and analyzed how users interacted with the product in their daily workflows.
The central tension we had to resolve: documents are the foundation of every user flow, regardless of persona — but the tools that add intelligence to those documents are tied to specific operational routines. That distinction drove the structural question.
The mapping revealed that the product had two distinct types of content that needed different organizational logic.
Within each layer, features were ordered by usage frequency — most-accessed at the top, progressively deeper as use decreases. This wasn't a categorization decision; it was a consistency rule applied across the entire navigation.
Because the redesign introduced major structural changes, we validated the proposal through usability testing before implementation.
Working with limited time and budget, participants were recruited using product usage data in partnership with the Customer Success team. The study included both SMB and Enterprise users representing core usage patterns.
The prototype was built in Figma as a fully navigable experience. Instead of asking users to locate predefined features, tasks were framed around real goals:
This helped uncover how users actually think about navigation, rather than measuring memorization.
The results were uneven — and that unevenness was informative.
The document layer held up — validating that the universal tab structure and labels resonated with users. The failures were concentrated in features with more specific use cases, where the 3-level depth created dead ends, and in account settings, which had no clear place in the proposed hierarchy.
To analyze results, we used the Atomic Research methodology — moving from observations → facts → insights → recommendations. This prevented the team from reacting to isolated usability moments and created a defensible rationale for every design decision.
The findings directly informed iterations: labels were rewritten using user language instead of product terminology, two navigation clusters were restructured, and navigation depth was reduced for high-frequency secondary tasks.
The rollout was implemented progressively — first released to 1,000 accounts with rollback access to the previous navigation, then adopted as the default structure for all new accounts. The categorization framework also became a reusable internal standard for future product additions, reducing ad-hoc information architecture decisions across teams.
The hardest part of this project was not designing the interface — it was building alignment around structural change.
Making the case required reframing the problem in terms of scalability, feature discoverability, product expansion, and operational efficiency — rather than discussing it purely as a UX issue.
One lesson that only became visible after launch: the new navigation relied on a technology update that made the platform more robust, but the additional layers introduced longer page render times. More time to render meant a worse experience than before — even if the structure itself was better. It was a reminder that performance is not an engineering concern separate from UX. It's part of the experience definition, and it should be in scope from the beginning.