Sumday, recently acquired by Vestwell, was a customer-facing investment platform backed by one of the country’s longest-lasting financial institutions, BNY Mellon. Sumday needed a nimble, accessibility-first design system that could support new features for various ABLE and college investment organizations.
Sumday’s legacy platform had changed direction a few times in the past, resulting in a good amount of design and technical debt. Creating a Design System was the only way to establish a maintainable, scalable foundation upon which to build the future of the platform. Since Sumday would support a wide array of partner investment plans, our approach needed to be modular, allowing us to avoid costly one-off designs, balancing client needs with our own internal roadmap.
Sumday's core user base was often disabled, so an important aspect of the Design System was to ensure all elements and interactions on the site were be WCAG 2.0 AA compliant. We were held to high legal standards, demanding clear information architecture, colorblind-friendly visual elements, and screen readers which gave an accurate representation of the design. We also ensured that our 30% (and growing!) mobile audience could enjoy a completely responsive design.
All of this required a highly standardized approach so the design team could stay in sync and avoid reinventing the wheel. We created a system of nested Sketch symbols to keep our UI elements organized and customizable. This made the team’s prototyping process much easier and faster as we worked on new features.
Now that the Design System was in working condition, I was able to start on a new feature: gifting! Following a competitive analysis of other gifting platforms, I was able to take Sumday’s existing personas and apply that knowledge to the rest of the process.
Our design process was preceded by a User Journey which identified the full spectrum of potential users and strived to understand their individual needs. I created this journey, reflecting both the Gift Givers’ and Gift Receivers' experiences. This helped pinpoint moments where we could delight our users with charming copy or illustrations, while maintaining a streamlined experience.
Next we created User Flows: granular logic trees depicting a user’s movements throughout the system, along with their “happy” or “unhappy” pathways. These provided essential context for our Engineering and QA Teams, and naturally guided the creative team through the next phases of design.
Once User Flows were approved, I moved on to designing actual interfaces in Sketch using our nested symbol architecture. I found a few opportunities to introduce upbeat illustrations in order to celebrate the gift-giving occasion, without sacrificing usability. I then created interactive prototypes in InVision, so stakeholder review could be done prior to development.
Through our flexible Design System, new features became much simpler to design and implement. Over time, many different types of investment accounts utilized our platform, and thousands of new users were able to confidently control their investment choices. After this launch, all clients saw growth in their registration metrics. After a year of the gifting feature going live, an additional $30M was contributed to users’ accounts!
I've had the privilege to work with a diverse range of clients and teams, from startups to Fortune 500 companies.
