Lifeplanner is a web application designed to help users manage the administrative and planning side of life — storing important documents, managing shared information with family or advisors, tracking personal finances, and preparing for future events including estate planning. It sits between a personal organiser and a private document vault.
The engagement covered redesigning the onboarding experience, adding several missing features, and building a design system the development team could work from consistently.
This engagement was collaborative throughout, working directly with the in-house development team and founders across the full design process. Several new features required significant technical input to design correctly, particularly the file sharing logic and the legal document flow, which meant design decisions stayed grounded in what the team could actually build. It also meant the design system delivered was one the team had already shaped — not something handed over and then interpreted.
The existing onboarding flow was losing users before they understood what they were signing up for. It was too long, asked for too much too early, and didn’t communicate the product’s value clearly enough to justify the effort being asked of a new user.
The onboarding flow was redesigned with payment integrated directly into the sequence — rather than as a separate post-signup step. This reduced the total stages a user had to navigate and removed the jarring transition between “exploring the product” and “now pay for it.” The redesign significantly reduced time-to-completion for new users and improved sign-up conversion.
Users needed to store sensitive documents — insurance policies, property records, medical records, identification — and share access with specific people at specific times. A standard “share this file” feature wasn’t sufficient.
A file storage and sharing system was designed with event-triggered or date-triggered access:
The design challenge: making a conceptually complex system (conditional access with time and event logic) feel straightforward enough that non-technical users would trust it and set it up correctly.
Estate planning and end-of-life document management is genuinely complicated — wills, powers of attorney, healthcare directives, beneficiary designations — and the relationships between documents matter as much as the documents themselves.
A legal document overview feature was designed that works in conjunction with the user’s legal advisor. The flow guides users through a custom setup process based on their personal circumstances and produces a structured overview of their estate documents and what each covers.
The goal wasn’t to replace legal advice — it was to give users a complete, organised picture of their legal situation in one place so they could work more effectively with advisors.
A security tips feature was designed that analyses the user’s stored data and generates personalised recommendations — not generic advice, but specific guidance relevant to what the user has stored and how they’ve configured their account. Tips surface based on actual gaps in configuration: missing two-factor authentication, shared access not recently reviewed, documents without designated emergency access.
The development team was implementing designs inconsistently — not from carelessness, but from the absence of a shared reference. A complete design system was built covering component definitions, spacing and layout rules, typography, colour usage, and interaction patterns — delivered as a Figma library the team actively used. Subsequent features were faster to implement and more consistent because developers had a single clear reference rather than having to interpret designs case by case.
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