FutureFuel Logo_Blue.png

Dashboard success state 

UX research

Wireframes (1).png
  • Conducted UX research in the product development stage

  • Designed for the dashboard state when a user pays off their student loan


Product Design

UX research


Paying off all student debt is a big moment that needs celebration. This is a lack of the accomplishment on the dashboard right now

Scope & Timeline

Two months


Information Architecture

Task flow


User Persona

UX research

​Competitive Analysis

I've done competitive analyses on billing design and the flow of manually adding a bank checking account.

Billing design competitive analysis

Manual adding a checking account competitive analysis

Round-Up - Funding Acct Manual - Competi

User persona and storyboard

Collaborating with the user researcher, I created user personas, customer journey, and storyboard based on takeaways from user interviews and survey results, aligning multiperspective feedback and results to better scale and target the most relevant user group for developing new features of the Futurefuel platform.

User persona for "Giveback"

a chrome extension to help earn cashback to pay down your student loan while shopping online

Storyboard for "Giveback"

Giveback storyboard.png

Storyboard for Futurefuel platform sales video

video storyboard.png

Design for a celebration moment

I led the design of the "loan paid off state" of the platform by creating mood board inspiration, user flow, and wireframe.


There is a long-wish need to create a design state for the SaaS dashboard when a user pays off their student debt.

The assumption is that allowing users to share their accomplishments moment from Futurefuel's platform will potentially increase social media traffic to account creations and onboarding numbers, also improving the experience of current users who are going to pay off their student debt using the platform.

FutureFuel.io Paydown-chart-2.jpg

This is the common state dashboard for all users who connected their student loans.


We are designing for the dashboard when there is zero balance. (loan-paidoff)

We need a new design for the Roll Up (where a user can see all their student loan accounts) tile state


  • How do we detect when a user pays off their student loan?

  • What triggers the loan-payoff state on the platform dashboard?

  • How to inform the user that they have paid off part of/all of their student loan?

  • What's the purpose of designing the payoff state of a user's student loan?

  • If a user has multiple loan accounts, how do we separately design for all loans are paid off and one of the loans are paid off? 

  • What metrics can we show about a user's loan paid off journey?

  • How to increase onboarding traffic through the social media sharing achievement card?

  • What features should be included on the achievement card?


Meetings with the project manager and the VP of product

  • Reconsidering the cost and minimal required features for the MVP

  • Determining three main action triggers to notify the user

  • Choosing emails as the main way to notify the user to log in and check their loan state and load-paid off state dashboard

  • Landing the user on the dashboard

  • Adding edge cases for mistakenly reporting

  • Discussing the metrics we can show to the user based on the database

User flow


Wireframes (1).png

Next step

After finishing the wireframes of the design, because it's near the end of my internship, I set up a hand-off meeting with the other two designers in the team so that they can continue working on hi-fidelity prototypes for this project. In the future, designers will be working on polishing the mood board to stay consistent with the updated visual design

For this project, I held several back-and-forth meetings with the project manager, product manager, user researcher, and other designers. All to figure out how to find balance and trade-off of the design decisions considering technical limitations and business values. If given more time, we would do more user research on this subject.

Open for Product Design roles and freelance projects.

© 2021 by Yifan Zhang with 💛