FN Actions Rebuild New — Daniella Marooney

Actions Rebuild

FiscalNote supports organizations to monitor, manage, and act on the issues that are important to them by combining policy and stakeholder data with AI technology and expert analysis.

TLDR: Rebuilt the Actions workflow into the backbone of the FiscalNote platform, connecting it seamlessly with stakeholder management, data profiles, and reporting. Projected 47% ARR growth.

Scope: Core workflow for every government affairs activity (meetings, campaigns, legislative efforts). Success here meant success for the rest of the platform.

Role: Lead IC driving research, IA, and interaction design.

Partnered with PMs, engineers, and data science to ensure cross-platform cohesion with AI features and components.

Projected Business Impact

Increase ARR by 47%

Project Overview

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    Problem & Technical Challenges
    Actions UI was built on old technology (Ember), causing friction for feature improvements.
Actions UI scored poorly in our all-platform usability study:
        Only 50% of users were able to successfully create an action.
Third longest task to complete.
Contained the most errors in completing the task.
Hesitation at 83%.

      
Qualitative interview data from users stated that Actions did not meet their needs:
        Workflow was not intuitive and slow.
Data did not match their work and lacked flexibility.
Significantly slowed down their work by manually recording tasks.

      

  

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    Business Goals
    Increase ARR for legacy FN platform and improve user satisfaction.
Improve user retention and increase revenue.

        Given the value of the Actions UI is directly correlated to how often users input them –
        it should be one of the quickest tasks.
      

  

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    Solutions
    Migrating and creating new components in Rails allows for quicker updates and usability improvements.
Improve workflow to include best practices for form flows.
Work with data science to pre-populate fields (early AI work).
Add flexible actions – ability for users to create custom actions.
Add additional data fields for better reporting.

  

Key Decisions

Unified fragmented workflows into a single, scalable system.

Designed flexible connections to Stakeholders, Reporting, and Data Profiles so nothing was siloed.

Simplified complex policy workflows into modular UI patterns for reuse across the platform.

Projected Business Impact & Results

Three key clients experiencing these pain points represented $850K in ARR. Post-implementation, user satisfaction was expected to increase dramatically, leading to contract renewals and expansion opportunities. and resulting in a 47% ARR increase from improved retention.

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47%

Increase in ARR

Key clients to report significant ROI improvements in their workflow.

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65%

Time Saved

Reduction in manual tracking and task completion for users.

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89%

User Satisfaction

Improvement in usability scores.

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$2.3M

Revenue Impact

Attribute to improved user retention.

Process

1

Research and Analysis

Conducted user interviews with 15+ government affairs officials to understand workflow pain points and inefficiencies.

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2

User Journey Mapping

Mapped existing workflows and identified key friction points in action tracking and reporting processes.

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3

Interface Design

Created intuitive design flows with clear visual hierarchy, making complex data accessible and actionable.

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Implementation and Design

Iterative rollout with user feedback integration, resulting in 89% satisfaction rate among beta users.

Early AI Features

Solutions

Pattern Recognition: AI identifies recurring action types

Smart Suggestions: Context-aware text completion

Auto-linking: Connects bills, stakeholders, campaigns

Trust Through Transparency: Always show WHY

Strategic Scoping

Vision: Full workflow pattern recognition

MVP: Focus on data linking and categorization

Rationale: Build trust before advanced features

Product Cohesion

Introduced a consistent drawer pattern for all CRUD actions, allowing users to create and edit without losing context.

This drawer became a platform standard — users could view while creating, keeping workflows seamless across features.

Rebuild explicitly tied together reporting and stakeholder management, making Actions the central hub. Instead of bouncing between disconnected modules, users had a single, integrated flow that supported the entire lifecycle of policy work.

Decisions here weren’t just UI fixes — they were architectural, shaping how the entire FiscalNote platform handled data creation and consumption.