When I started this project, the VP of Product had just left, leaving me in charge of the design team. We were also newly acquired by a bigger company, and was pressured to deliver in the next few months.

My team and I quickly set out to take the product in a different direction, focusing on giving users a more task based system to understand their finances.

The result was an increase in usage in key features, returning users, and newly signed clients.

We looked at our data to see where users were arriving and it is clear that the Dashboard gets the most attention, which makes sense. It is your first interaction with the platform, and where you come back to after you log back in.

Even with decent pageviews, the underlying problem lies with our retention rate.

That is an abysmal retention rate, especially for a learning platform. From talking to clients and users over the years, we know the main painpoints that are causing this.

So how do our competitors solve these problems?

A common thread links them all. Each has a “Next Step” or a “What’s Next” feature to guide their users on their financial journey.

To be fair, we have this too, but ours gets lost in the clutter.

And before landing on the screen above, users would have the option to go through this 15 minutes questionnaire about their finances.

After completing this there is no success screen, or anything that directly relates to what they just went through. They simply get thrown onto the dashboard that you saw from above.

So with the dashboard set as the revamp to deliver to users and clients, we opened pandoras box.

After years of promises to clients, my team received a myriad of other requests that can fall in line with a dashboard.

It’s clear that we need to design a dashboard that will satisfy our clients, but also to make sure that some of these future features do not overwhelm our users.

I created a roadmap for my team and the company, splitting up the dashboard into several phases.

With only 3 months to go (and holidays around the corner), the designers got to work. Did I mention that design AND development needed to wrap in 3 months?

On top of the short timeline, my team has been requesting to completely scrap the old visual design of the platform, and start fresh. We asked, and were granted the ability to do so.

Ambitious...but I believed my team could do it.

In the past before I had a full blown project on this, I had some free time (and different problems from the company), so I had created some ideations about a year before.

I would use these as a sort of jumping off point for later ideations.

And from there I would sketch some other ideas.

A glaring issue is that the dashboard just has too many things going for it. Learners on our platform have a lot of pathways they can take, and the design principle before was just to stuff everything there.

We can easily clean this up by introducing a side menu on the dashboard.

And with an inevitable slate of new features in the future, we don’t want to end up where we started. Simply adding subpages rather than to the page itself will help with the hierarchy and maintain the cleanliness of the page.

On top of the flexibility of new features, iGrad is a highly configurable platform. That means, we offer clients the ability to turn on or off certain features.

Goals

Flexibility

Configurations

Learning should be fun. You’re already putting yourself through one of the more monotonous (but important) subjects: finances.

Our platform was not delivering this spirit. All around, there are just a bunch of words, numbers, and maybe an occasional icon.

Looking back at my project before, email redesigns, we started incorporating a more fun tone. This was a great opportunity to align our systems.

And so taking a cue from the emails, we expanded our library of illustrations and icons to make it a core part of the user experience.

However with this decision, we had internal concerns that this tone would be too informal for some clients. This is because some clients were worried that this specific style would clash with their branding¹.

Our team did not want to give up on this idea, so we came up with a new system: Theming.

No Theme

Themed

This actually has been a request from clients for years, as every platform looked nearly identical. Allowing them to choose a theme was a step in the right direction.

For this phase alone, this would launch with just the two styles: No Theme and Themed.

As more and more of these concepts arrive to build upon each other, we see the progress in the ideations below.

It’s getting closer to what we wanted, but this concept was just a checklist. We already had a feature in a different flow that was a checklist, so I thought it would start getting confusing.

Not only that, but it’s not emanating the fun aspect we were striving for.

I circled back with my intern who was researching gamification and asked about how I can implement some elements of gamification earlier on, rather than the next phase.

After reading her research and thinking about my video gaming experiences (I am an avid gamer after all), I came up with a task based system.

With tasks as our driving feature, we can now see how this would feel on our dashboard.

When a user would complete all the Getting Started tasks (image left), there would be a set of tasks that would then lead to a next batch of tasks (image to the right).

But, I realized we’re still overwhelming the user with a bunch of information by having tasks, and widgets on the same page.

My next mindset was that I should just go wild and really push the boundaries of where I want the product to go. If we are solving for pointing users to the right direction, the tasks should be the main highlight anyways.

With all of these changes, the dashboard is now focused on getting users to accomplish tasks around the platform.

We tested with users, showing them the old platform dashboard compared to the new one (making sure we differentiated which one we showed first).

Here are some of our main lessons learned.

We were confident with the results and had a meeting with the company, where we revealed the new features and flow.

Everything seemed to be going smoothly, but of course we would run into a few hiccups.

There was a backend issue in implementing the checkup experience. Due to the massive overhaul, it was just not feasible migrate from AngularJS to React in the given time frame².

This was a very important feature as it is supposed to address the pain point below.

The platform was always personalizing the user experience with the information, ie powering up a user’s recommendation of articles, but we weren’t really doing a good job of showing that. The revamp was supposed to wrap it all together in one package.

To reach our deadline, we had to axe the full version and push it into another phase.

We still needed to address the major pain point, but with a closing timeline we needed to do it fast.

So after completing the checkup, we implemented a simple screen with 3 cards to provide immediate feedback before users proceed to the home page.

This is a bandaid fix, and we have the intention of tackling the larger design implementation at a later time.

After all the considerations and adjustments, here is our new flow for the platform!

We launched phase 1 of the dashboard overhaul to enthusiastic fanfare from our clients and our users.

Our team pulled through, accomplishing what we set out to do in a short amount of time.

Based on what we delivered, we received new clients that would have only signed if there was a significant improvement to the user experience.

Shortly after this launch, we worked at a quick pace for phase 2, delivering a much needed leveling system. We won’t dive into it here, but here’s a look at some of the components we worked on.

With both these phases combined, we ended up increasing the retention rate by 10%, up from 1%.

I left the company in June of 2023. I was proud of what my team was able to ship in the short amount of time we were given.

I learned a lot about how to ship products, end to end, and just being given a lot of responsibility about where to take things.

If iGrad continues down the route that we planned, I am confident that this platform will truly help people learn and understand their finances.