Every Step, Considered

The original platform had three major issues.

The biggest problem lived in the most crucial flow. A user picks a consultation, selects a consultant, fills out personal information, then fills out consultation details, only to discover there's no slot available and no way to continue with another consultant. They have to start over. That single dead end was costing the business real customers.

I surfaced availability up front so people find an open consultant first, then collect details, plus a fast path straight from the homepage into booking. Paired with a refreshed visual system and style guide, the redesigned platform looks the part and converts.

Earnest's customer-service team was buried in calls about routine tasks, payments, tax docs, payment status, because customers had nowhere good to self-serve. I built a new home dashboard from 0-to-1 for every Earnest customer.

Phase 1, discovery and research: three user personas built from the old dashboards, then a PRD with the Product Manager breaking down every feature and its priority, then wireframes. Phase 2, design, test, design: months of iteration and user testing to get as close to a perfect product as possible before launch.

Earnest's Rate Check lets students get an estimated rate without a credit-score hit. But the pivotal independent-vs-cosigned choice was confusing: there was no way to compare the two options side by side, and the copy and 'popular' tag nudged users in conflicting directions, creating friction and dropping them out of the funnel.

I built a choice-outcome matrix specific to undergraduates to understand the real stakes of each option, surfaced the key decision factors side by side, and removed the misleading nudges. After A/B testing and tweaks from Product, I worked closely with front-end developers to ship it.