Established Clear Objectives with Stakeholders

We began by aligning on a purpose statement that emphasized harmonizing the experience across platforms. I helped refine vague success criteria—like “positive feedback”—into measurable goals: reduced application time, retention of adoption rates, increased active users, and fewer support calls.

Diagnosed Experience Gaps with Limited Access

Initially, we couldn’t access the tool. I worked around this by annotating user flows from video walkthroughs to identify major pain points:

• Required fields lacked visual indicators

• Poor hierarchy made text-heavy pages hard to parse

• Navigation behavior was inconsistent and confusing

These findings provided an early map of friction points to resolve in the redesign.

Validated Usability with a Focused Heuristic Review

Once we gained access to the tool, I led a targeted heuristic evaluation—scoped intentionally to be efficient but impactful. What made this analysis stand out was how collaboratively it was shaped. I partnered closely with our content strategist to ensure the evaluation addressed not just interaction design and visual hierarchy, but also language clarity and content usability.

Together, we selected four heuristics that allowed us to assess the experience from multiple angles: user control and freedom, consistency and standards, match between system and real-world expectations, and error recognition and recovery. This joint lens helped us go beyond the surface, identifying where ambiguous copy, visual clutter, or poor error handling created friction for financial professionals.

This collaboration bridged design and content seamlessly, giving us a more holistic view of the tool’s usability and laying the groundwork for clearer navigation, smarter defaults, and more intuitive guidance in the redesigned experience.

Uncovered a Need for Flexible, Nonlinear Workflows

Stakeholder interviews revealed that financial professionals didn’t work linearly. They jumped between application sections depending on task relevance. This insight shaped a new UX concept:

• A personalized application landing page showed progress across all sections

• Tabbed navigation enabled professionals to move freely across the tool

This approach balanced structure with flexibility, giving users control without losing clarity.

Built, Tested, and Refined with Financial Professionals

I developed high-fidelity designs across 11 core page types, each with multiple states and error conditions. We iterated through three internal design reviews, then validated concepts in sessions with real financial professionals—marking our first direct user engagement. Feedback confirmed that the new navigation and error handling significantly improved usability and reduced ambiguity.

Delivered Key Interface Transformations

"My Applications" dashboard

Introduced an “Application Updates” panel and direct access to start an application

Application Overview for a "free-form" experience

Combined pre-filled data from quotes with visible progress indicators, breadcrumbs, and a right-hand help pane

Information Pages that were easier to digest

Improved hierarchy, clarified required fields, and introduced smart error handling that flagged issues in both navigation tabs and sidebar prompts