BrightPlan Financial Wellness

Bridging user needs with business goals through thoughtful design.

Project Overview

BrightPlan is a fintech platform that helps employees build financial wellness through personalized planning and investing. I partnered with their team to refine key user flows in the app, aligning the design to business goals while making complex financial decisions feel simple and approachable

Project Skills

Prototyping

Persona development

Journey mapping

JTBD frameworks

Business alignment

Project Tools

Sketch

JIRA / Confluence

Adobe Photoshop

Project Team

Lead Designer

Product Manager

Devloper

Business Owner

Problem Statement

BrightPlan needed to design a financial wellness app that could simplify complex wealth-management tasks into an approachable mobile experience.

The challenge was to balance compliance requirements with a clear, trustworthy interface that everyday users could adopt with confidence.

Challenges, Opportunities & Goals

Challenge: Make financial planning approachable while meeting strict compliance and regulatory requirements.

Opportunity: Position BrightPlan as a trusted, user-friendly alternative in the competitive FinTech market by simplifying complex wealth-management flows.

Goal: Deliver a mobile app experience that builds user confidence, streamlines planning tasks, and lays the foundation for long-term product adoption.

Design Research & Planning

Discovery Workshops & Whiteboarding

Early in the project, I facilitated whiteboarding sessions with stakeholders and team members to unpack user goals, financial tasks, and systemic constraints.

These workshops allowed us to visualize complex financial journeys, align around common pain points, and identify opportunities for simplification before moving into structured flows.

  • Mapped out scenarios like retirement planning, investment tracking, and budgeting.
  • Captured friction points in decision-making and task handoffs.
  • Highlighted where financial terminology and process complexity created barriers.
  • Built a shared foundation that guided wireframes and design direction.

    I led a structured research process that blended discovery workshops, user journey mapping, and synthesis of financial behaviors. This surfaced pain points in planning and investing, aligned the team on opportunities, & grounded design decisions in both user needs and business goals.

    Persona Development

    To align financial wellness features with real customer needs, I created personas synthesizing research insights, demographics, and behavioral patterns.

    These personas gave the team a relatable reference point for design decisions and helped prioritize journeys across different user segments.

    • Investor Types: Differentiated between novice planners, mid-career professionals, and seasoned investors.
    • Motivations: Captured goals such as saving for retirement, managing debt, or improving financial literacy.
    • Pain Points: Highlighted complexity in financial tools, lack of trust, and difficulty tracking progress.
    • Design Impact: Informed journey mapping, content tone, and tailored product features to match user priorities.

      Design Execution

      Low Fidelity Concept Iterations

      To validate flows early, I worked through low fidelity iterations with the product team.

      These allowed stakeholders to test scenarios such as onboarding, retirement goal setup, and investment planning.

      Quick iterations surfaced usability issues before high-fidelity design began.

      • Simulated critical user tasks end-to-end.
      • Enabled stakeholder feedback sessions without full builds.
      • Reduced rework by aligning on flows prior to engineering.
      • Provided a low-cost way to validate direction with stakeholders.

      With research insights and journey mapping in place, I moved into design execution to translate findings into tangible product flows.

      The focus was on building wireframes and prototypes that could validate BrightPlan’s financial wellness experience early, align stakeholders around key interactions, and create a scalable design system to support future growth.

      Early Wireframes and Specifications

      To establish the foundation of BrightPlan’s financial wellness platform, I created wireframes that explored layout, navigation, and content hierarchy.

      These mid-fidelity screens balanced flexibility with compliance requirements while surfacing key interactions around account setup, goals, and dashboards.

      • Defined page templates for common flows (onboarding, goals, portfolio setup).
      • Standardized content regions and grid structure for consistency.
      • Enabled rapid iteration across multiple design variations before visual design.
      • Created a shared framework that smoothed the transition into high-fidelity design.

      Style Guide & Design System

      To ensure long-term consistency, I created a style guide that documented BrightPlan’s core visual and interaction patterns.

      This system aligned design, engineering, and product teams, making it easier to scale new features while maintaining a cohesive user experience.

      • Codified foundations: color palette, typography, iconography, and grid system.
      • Reusable components: standardized cards, forms, navigation, and data visualizations.
      • Interaction rules: states, transitions, and accessibility guidelines for clarity.
      • Scalability: enabled faster handoffs and reduced ambiguity during implementation.

      Final Product Evolution

      While the visuals have since evolved, the flows and structural decisions from my original work remain visible in the current app.

      This continuity demonstrates how the foundation I designed endured beyond the proof-of-concept phase.

      • Current app-store version still reflects the journey structures established in the MVP.
      • Later design teams layered in polish, features, and updated visual style.
      • My early prototype provided the core DNA that guided the product’s long-term direction.

      Successful Outcomes

      By grounding design decisions in user journeys and personas, the team validated core flows early, aligned stakeholders across engineering and product, and established a design system that could scale with new features.

      The result was a launch-ready experience that delivered confidence to leadership and a clear foundation for future enhancements.

      4.9

      App store rating

      13K

      Engaged users

      55%

      Higher employee engagement rate

      Created a repeatable design framework for financial wellness flows.

      Created a repeatable design framework for financial wellness flows.

      Delivered a working product that scaled across retirement and investment scenarios.

      Key Takeaways & Lessons Learned

      Turning complex financial services into clear user journeys demanded both rigor in design and measurable business alignment.

      A clear style guide created design consistency, reducing friction in feature expansion.

      Prototyping tied user needs to measurable outcomes, helping stakeholders prioritize.

      Embedding design in business strategy made financial wellness tools more scalable.

      Project Assets

      A curated set of project artifacts for reference — from research studies to prototypes — providing visibility into the process and deliverables behind the final outcome.

      Copyright 2025 Kevin Keiper