Savvly

As the sole designer, I worked directly with the marketing and engineering leads across many workstreams, from user research and visual design to pitch decks and marketing assets. This case study focuses on two: redesigning the client dashboard and restructuring the landing page for narrative clarity.

Savvly is a longevity benefit: a financial product that pools contributions and pays out structured cash at ages 80, 85, 90, and 95. The core promise is protection against outliving your savings. But the existing product experience was telling the wrong story.

Savvly estimator, before redesign — leads with return percentage, no narrative context

The estimator led with projections: how much could you get, under which scenarios, compared to what. It framed Savvly as an investment product competing on returns. But the deeper issue was that most people didn't know longevity benefits exist or why they'd need one. The status quo wasn't even a competing product — there was no existing product at all.

User research confirmed this: thinking about retirement made people uncomfortable. Most had never named "outliving your savings" as a specific risk they needed to plan for. That was the key design signal: the experience couldn't open with a calculator.

Calculators are for people who've already decided to engage. The experience needed to meet people at the point of avoidance, make the problem feel real without triggering anxiety, and then present Savvly as the natural response.

An analogy that shaped the framing: nobody buys home insurance because it offers the best financial return — they buy it because of the specific fear that their house may burn down. The value is psychological before it's numerical. Savvly addresses the same emotional structure. The disaster isn't a house burning down; it's outliving your money. That reframes Savvly entirely: not an investment product competing on returns, but a risk management product offering protection against a specific, underacknowledged fear.

The estimator lives inside the employee dashboard — the view a client sees after onboarding, designed to help them understand their benefit, play with their numbers, and stay engaged with Savvly over time.

The redesign focused on fewer inputs, progressive disclosure, and a narrative arc that established the problem before introducing the solution. Rather than opening on a calculator, the new flow established longevity risk first — what it is and why traditional retirement planning doesn't address it — and then introduced Savvly as the response.

I proposed a fuller narrative experience to the team, but the scope was focused on the estimator itself, so that's where I concentrated the work.

Through user testing, I found that people are broadly skeptical of financial projections. What resonated was specificity about the downside: not "here's what you might get" but "here's what happens if you live to 95 and your savings run out." I changed the key visual to a shark-fin curve that shows how Savvly's payouts grow larger at exactly the ages when savings tend to run out.

The payout cards used a gift-box visual treatment — each age milestone presented as something you'd receive rather than a line on a graph, animating in sequence to reinforce the idea of payouts arriving over time rather than a single lump-sum projection.

The existing page led with product mechanics. I restructured it around the same storytelling arc: establish the emotional problem, introduce longevity risk with supporting statistics, then present Savvly as the solution with the estimator as the call to action.

Design exploration, January–May 2026

The Shed

A transcription is learning a recorded solo by ear, note by note. One of the foundational ways jazz musicians learn is by copying the way the greats played. The process requires slowing audio down, looping short phrases, and marking moments to return to.

Most musicians have their own cobbled-together process: YouTube and a separate metronome, Chrome extensions, an MP3 download into whatever playback software they have. But across all methods, the workflow is fragmented and constantly pulls you out of the music.

I built this because my own process was fragmented — and I realized that only part of my slowness was my ear. The rest was the clumsy process itself.

I observed three jazz musicians transcribing in their natural workflow before designing anything.

• One had opened a professional audio editing suite — not to edit anything, but purely to see the waveform so he could set loop points with precision. He was using a tool built for audio engineers just for that one visual.
• Another was using his phone's YouTube app, double-tapping to skip forward and back. The 10-second jumps were too imprecise for phrase-level work, and he'd overshoot every time.
• A third kept switching apps mid-session to use a separate metronome.

I then ran think-aloud sessions with five musicians on an early version of the tool, and sent them iterations as I built.

Waveform over video: Watching a musician pull up an audio engineer tool was the clearest signal — musicians need to see the audio, not the video. I added an MP3 upload tab with a full waveform view for precise loop-point setting. For YouTube uploads, I kept the large video player because musicians are so used to that interface that removing it would feel foreign.

Speed-relative seeking: At 0.5× speed, skipping 5 seconds forward feels like 10 real seconds of music, which felt too far. I made skip distance proportional to playback speed, so at half speed you move half as far.

Built-in metronome with BPM sync: Once I saw the app-switching happening, the fix was obvious. Tap or detect the tempo, and the metronome syncs to it. When you slow the playback down, the metronome slows with it. You can practice a phrase at full speed, drop it to half, and practice again without ever reentering the tempo.

Keyboard shortcuts: Think-aloud sessions made clear I needed more than YouTube's defaults. I added up/down arrows for speed and a key to drop a marker mid-phrase without breaking flow.

A-to-B looping: Set two points in the audio and loop between them indefinitely while you work out a phrase.

A single-page tool that consolidates the full transcription workflow:

All without ever leaving the browser.

An unexpected use case emerged after launch: composition arrangers using the tool, working through a recording phrase by phrase to transcribe a piece before arranging it for a new ensemble!

EmpowerHealth

This project started within the Fung Fellowship at UC Berkeley, where I worked alongside Ishita Srivastava, Ashley Huerta, and Nessia Dambal. After the fellowship concluded, I continued developing the project with a team (Ishita Srivastava and Jonanne Talebloo), with me as the design lead.

Chronic illness is invisible, non-linear, and hard to explain in fifteen minutes. Yet fifteen minutes is often all a patient gets. By the time someone with a chronic condition sits down with a doctor, they're carrying years of context — misdiagnoses, symptoms that fluctuate, mental and physical pain that are deeply entangled — and almost none of it makes it into the room. Doctors either don't have access to the history, don't have time to absorb it, or don't believe it.

The result is a system where patients feel unseen, and providers aren't able to do better.

We conducted several interviews with users living with chronic illness and with providers. The users we spoke with had between them: years of misdiagnosis, $17,000 paid out of pocket, 50+ specialist appointments for a single condition, and a job lost mid-treatment.

The provider side was just as constrained. Dr. Bennett described watching patients' lives get "smaller and smaller and smaller, and the focus on the pain get larger and larger" — a compounding spiral he wanted to interrupt but had no infrastructure to address in a standard appointment.

How might we facilitate provider-patient relationships toward a supportive environment where those with chronic illness feel understood and valued?

A key tension we kept returning to: patients don't just want their data tracked; they want to own their narrative going into an appointment. Feeling seen by a doctor is different from feeling surveilled by an app. The design needed to hold that distinction.

We designed two linked portals: a patient-facing mobile app and a provider dashboard.

The patient app centered on a daily diary card — a design that holds space for whatever a user was carrying that day without making the process feel clinical or burdensome.

The provider dashboard used AI-summarized data from patient diary cards before appointments, flagging new symptoms, mood trends, and key concerns the patient had noted, so the fifteen minutes could be spent on care rather than catch-up.

This was primarily a research project. The design we produced was early-stage and untested with real patients or providers. The research is the strongest part of the work — the product is a first sketch of where that research pointed. A real next step would be usability testing, particularly around the diary card interaction and how doctors actually want to receive and scan summarized data under time pressure.

The fibromyalgia catch-22 alone points to a harder question the design doesn't yet answer: how do you build trust into a system when the system itself has already broken it?

Pathrise Education

Pathrise is a platform for college consultants to manage and support their students through the admissions process. My team designed the consultant-facing dashboard, giving consultants a centralized view of each student's tasks, deadlines, and application progress across their full caseload.

After sitting in on consultant interviews, I noticed a recurring gap: students arrived at writing sessions with no organized material. They were managing essays manually across notes, docs, and spreadsheets, reusing content across schools without a system, and tracking deadlines separately from their writing progress. This forced consultants to spend time on logistics instead of guidance.

To find the underlying structure, I mapped my own college application materials from senior year — stories, brainstorming docs, spreadsheets — until a repeatable phase-by-phase formula emerged. I proposed and designed a student-facing brainstorm portal independently based on this.

The portal walks students through five phases: building a story bank, grouping experiences into themes, matching themes to essay types, drafting outlines, and generating a college-specific timeline. Instead of managing ten separate essays for ten schools, students build one narrative system that maps across all their applications.

After presenting, the team noted this workflow is most relevant for high-achieving students applying to many schools, which aligns well with Pathrise's existing consultant clientele.