LifeSync®

The digital opportunity

From a national online survey, Wells Fargo found that 80% of Gen Z and 79% of Millenials prefer to manage their money matters digitally. With a user population ripe for opportunities, LifeSync was born as an answer to documenting a complete picture of financial statistics and goals. Viewing statistics is only one piece of the puzzle, and this new feature offers a holistic view of wealth trends, target areas, and personalized advice to grow the former—together.

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My contributions & the results

I joined LifeSync about seven months before their initial launch, and it was clear immediately that this project was moving fast from 0 to 1. My role almost immediately became Design Delivery Lead, and I did what I do best—dividing, conquering, organizing, and color-coding anything that wasn’t nailed down. Streamlining design patterns and the delivery of work to development partners paid off, and together the LifeSync team yielded some incredible results (source):

• 8 months after the initial release, 100,000 goals were created—amounting to $24 billion in financial plans
• 3 major releases in one year, giving access to Lifesync to 70 million customers

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Better delivery first means a few broken eggs (first)

All told, LifeSync has been a great journey and the team hums pretty smoothly. But preparing work for delivery and ultimately release is a team effort, and my first attempts weren’t perfect. Quickly managing edge cases and anticipating how designs (and their data) would respond to various settings and devices was a big task. Defects or oversights hurt team velocity, and I began to treat delivery as its own user experience study.

We had a wealth of data and understanding of our users, but I needed to hone my focus on an understanding of my product and development partners. I listened, took a lot of notes, asked many questions, and sought to figure out how to alleviate pain points. Ultimately the answer was very simple: answer questions before they’re asked.

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Writing a better delivery recipe

I had to dump out my Figma file and start fresh. But this time I had to put things back together in a way that made sense for the ones who would be building the product. I had to consider the needs of a developer; they need to write code for every possible use case, and I need to create documentation for each one. I poked metaphorical holes in every screen and documented their possibilities ahead of time.

This resulted in a crafted micro design system and a robust library of screens for: display logic, API failures, zoom states, and customer segmentation. I created a new standard for delivery, and this gave me the building blocks to create files for new user bases much more efficiently. This helped make our results possible. As a bonus, this transformation has been so well-received that I’ve given multiple workshops on better delivery practices.

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What’s next

Documentation for everyone! Designers and developers have different needs, and I spent the remainder of my time on this project working on filling in the gaps as LifeSync moved from an MVP stage. LifeSync is still growing to this day, and the foundations I worked on here will serve it well as it continues to evolve from user feedback and new technology.