A CASE STUDY ABOUT

UX Strategy & UI Design

Need a way to level up your product? I helped do just that with a Goals feature that made coaching clearer, helped clients see impact, and boosted adoption, all under tight constraints.

The Opportunities

We launched a career coaching app! Now we had to prove its value and stand out in the market. Here's what people were asking for:

  • User data revealed a need to clarify product benefits

  • Coaches asked for tools to guide conversations around goals

  • Clients wanted insights to support growth and retention

Our idea? A Goals feature to expand our tools and gain qualitative insights.

The Challenges

  • The mobile design system was ready, but web wasn’t. We needed a flexible foundation to scale across platforms.

  • Our component library had to grow intentionally, even when competitive research gave us great ideas to chase.

  • We were building fast for clients, but still needed quick user insight to know what would drive adoption.

The Scope

Role: Lead Product Designer

Timeline: 3 weeks

Team: PMs, Dev, Marketing, Design

Deliverables: personas, user flows, components, prototypes, handoff, QA

Focus Areas: user research, product branding, global scalability

The Discovery Phase

Our clients needed data to justify their investment, and we needed user research quickly to decide on initial features. Here’s the strategy:

  • Explored competitive designs and smart patterns we could adapt without breaking our design system.

  • Leveraged internal networks for user interviews and surfaced early pain points to guide proto-personas.

  • Merged research and stakeholder input to define a primary persona to shape the early feature flow.

Competitive Research

To ground the feature in real-world expectations (our design system), I researched how similar tools framed familiar usage patterns:

  • guided onboarding and goal management

  • structured interaction timelines

  • dependencies, due date reminders, and calendar flows

Spectrum Mapping & Proto-personas

I then designed interviews to explore how people manage tasks, goals, and tracking, and mapped their behavior on a spectrum...

....and grouped patterns into proto-personas to spotlight the features that mattered most.

Primary Persona & Information Architecture

I combined interview insights, competitive analysis, and input from PMs, coaching teams, and VPs to refine a primary persona and map an initial user flow and prioritize key features needed for launch.

The Buildup to Launch

Using the research, proto-personas, and competitive analysis, I kicked off the design process by:

  • Collaboratively refining designs through a staged fidelity process

  • Creating user flows and interactive prototypes to guide specs and speed up handoff

  • Flipping our usual flow by designing mobile first, then adapting for desktop

Lo to Mid-Fi Wireframes

Ideation that doesn’t bloat the system: I sketched early ideas with our existing components in mind, avoiding cool-but-costly additions and focusing on what could ship fast.

Getting aligned early on: This overview gave the team a sense of the big picture and helped spot gaps before specs dropped, covering flow points like animations, confirmations, and a sense of a completeness.

Feature Overview

Prototyping the User Flow

Now, for the deeper dive: This prototype mapped detailed user states like editing, deleting, loading, errors, and character limits, so we could test the full experience before build and catch edge cases early.

Handoff Build Details

Dev Mode helps, but specs still matter: I documented key details like component dimensions, system alignment, and responsive behavior across iOS and Android to keep the build tight and consistent.

Peek at the Desktop View

The desktop system was limited, so let’s flip the usual process: I used the mobile flow I built as the base and adjusted just enough to make it work across platforms.

The Main Takeaways

V1 ≠ Final: Stick to the design system and let gaps reveal themselves.

Use what you’ve got. Early feedback and testing will tell you what truly needs to be customized.

Feeling stuck? Research is your shortcut.

Even scrappy research or competitor scans can unblock your flow and help shape smarter ideas.

Launch isn’t the end, building adoption into the product is part of the process.

Pair your feature with onboarding moments and marketing touchpoints. I used these assets to drive engagement:

The Key Impacts

30% faster launch with fewer QA issues.

Overlapping the spec process across mobile and desktop helped streamline dev handoff and became a go-to model for future features.

Increased client buy-in with real, qualitative insights.

Goals data gave sales something real to show, letting clients connect employee outcomes to product value.

Users who engaged with Goals were 20% more likely to book a call.
A default “Set up a coaching call” prompt (my design-led strategy to highlight value early), paired with coach training to reinforce it, was driving users to real action... and FullStory confirmed it was working.

Thanks for reading!

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