Case Study
thelighthouse Web App
Collaborated with a career growth platform startup — "the Waze for your career" — helping mid-career professionals through mentorship matching, curated resources, and community events.
Challenge
Redesigning onboarding and dashboards to create tailored career goal experiences. Rather than using uniform patterns across all professions, I focused on role-specific journeys for people managers and product managers while maintaining repeatable elements.
Research
Primary: Leveraged existing mentoring session data, analyzing advice and trajectories from current managers to identify consistent patterns for dashboard design.
Secondary: Examined Noom and LinkedIn Learning for goal-progression pacing, alongside ClickUp and Asana for information architecture inspiration.
Design Process
Wireframes
Initial lo-fi iterations segmented resources by type with peer matches displayed prominently, using a universal layout applicable across career paths.
Product Manager
Evolved from resource-type segmentation to progress-based design reflecting actual career trajectory steps.
People Manager
Research revealed this pathway involved broader conceptual frameworks and questions expanding into exercises and resources, requiring a distinct design pattern enabling deep topic exploration with step-by-step progression.
Validation
People Manager testing: 4 users, 30-min Zoom interviews. Users appreciated centralized navigation and comprehensive consolidation. Requested note-taking, planning tools, self-evaluation.
Product Manager testing: 6 users, 25-30 min Zoom interviews. Positive reception for organized layout with clear progression. Requested expanded networking features and hands-on experience opportunities.
Takeaways
- Prioritize research-driven decisions over initial design commitments
- Complex products often require multiple design patterns within single dashboards to authentically serve different user segments
- Role-specific journeys with shared structural elements balance customization with scalability