Alix is an estate settlement company. I am leading product design for Alix.
Mission statement
Alix is powering wealth across generations with an intuitive, AI-powered app and dedicated care team that handle the hardest parts of estate settlement for you. From the first conversation to the last signatures, Alix delivers personalized guidance and takes tedious tasks off your plate, so you can be sure your next step is the right one while giving time back to the people that need you most.
It all starts with an idea
I joined Alix as the first of 10 employees. When I joined, Alix’s leadership had some minimal Brand guidance from outside stakeholders. We had some initial product designs as well that you can see here. My job was to help elevate their product design and create an 18 month vision for our product.
OLD DESIGNS
Brand guidelines
One of the first things we did was create some brand guidelines for our company. This included product and marketing guidelines
Design system
I took then took the brand guidelines, and created a design system. This was critical for us, as we needed a clear way to communicate our product design ideas and functionality to the engineering team and the rest of the company.
Here are some examples of concepts I explored such as elevations, typography, colors, buttons. All of these styles/components were built by our engineering team.
These are our core content cards that lived throughout the sections of our experience
Elevations are very important when thinking through how content is shown. Product, Engineers, and myself thought through how to best display elevations within our ecosystem.
Feature work / User research
At Alix, we take research very seriously. We did have the opportunity to run some research with existing customers and also generally did research with people who have gone through estate settlement to really understand our users. We also contracted a UX Researcher to help us run additional tests that would inevitably help us understand what features to build for our product. Part of my job at Alix was to help redefine the strategy and future of our product. And I started thinking through some concepts beginning with some high level user flows of what we wanted to solve for.
You can see we mapped out a persona given what we knew about our customer base. What I love to do for big projects is to create a user journey map, so that everyone can get together to think about our users and their jobs to get done. We’re all method actors anyway, aren’t we? :)
So then based on this user journey, research, and using our design system and brand guidelines, I was able to start to think through the future of our app. This was a project that was given to me by our CTO specifically to dedicate time into understand where our product could go. I established certain “sections” of our experience based on the core journeys and then designed against them.
I then started to think through some interesting problems such as how can we create this feeling of engagement for our users. We wanted our users to feel compelled to use our app. And in order to do that, I thought it would be a really neat idea to show their activity in a feed. But what makes this even more compelling, is that they could contact our Care team directly anytime they wanted.
Our Care team is an immensely important part of Alix. We wanted to create a quick and seamless way for our customers to contact them. We wanted them to video chat with our Care team, but also be able to message them directly.
As it stands today
(work in progress)
As I continue to explore these options for our product, I did want to share some of what we have today. There is still a LOT left to do. But we recently launched a brand new iOS and Android app. And thought it would be cool to show off our simple, yet effective experience