Retirement Budget Calculator Onboarding

Project Background

Parker Financial offers a Retirement Budget Calculator — a complex financial planning tool that helps users project their retirement income and expenses. The onboarding flow for new users was confusing and lengthy, leading to high drop-off before users ever reached the core value of the product.

This capstone project focused on redesigning the onboarding experience end-to-end: reducing friction, clarifying the value proposition, and getting users to their first meaningful output as quickly as possible.

The Problem

Goal & Scope

• Redesign the onboarding flow from account creation through first meaningful output
• Reduce time-to-first-value from 8+ minutes to under 3.5 minutes
• Clarify what the tool does before asking users to input data
• Create a step-by-step guided flow that surfaces progress and reduces cognitive load
• Deliver a high-fidelity clickable prototype for stakeholder presentation

My Role

I led the UX design on this project as the primary designer, working within a small team at Heroic Development. I was responsible for the full design process — from competitive analysis and user flows through wireframing, visual design, and the final prototype used in investor and stakeholder presentations.

Target Users

The primary user — who I referred to throughout the project as "Scot" — is a pre-retirement professional in their late 50s to mid 60s. They're financially literate but not tech-savvy. They want to understand roughly what retirement looks like for them but feel overwhelmed by complex financial software.

• Age 55–65, approaching retirement
• Comfortable with spreadsheets but not financial planning software
• Values clarity and progress — wants to see results, not just input forms
• Low tolerance for friction or jargon

Design Process

Empathy & Personas

I developed a primary persona based on user interviews conducted with pre-retirees. The key insight: users didn't abandon because the tool was wrong for them — they abandoned because the first five minutes gave them no sense of what they'd get out of it. The value was invisible until too late in the flow.

Onboarding Flow

I mapped the full existing onboarding as a flow diagram in FigJam, identifying every decision point, every required input, and every moment where a user might question whether to continue. This revealed the core problem: the tool asked for too much before giving anything back.

The redesigned flow introduced a "what is a plan?" explainer screen early in the process, showed users a sample output before they committed to data entry, and broke the input process into clearly labeled stages with a visible progress indicator.

Design Sketches → Wireframes → High Fidelity

I started with rough sketches exploring different approaches to progressive disclosure — how to chunk the data input into digestible steps without losing the sense of progress. From sketches, I moved into low-fidelity wireframes in Figma to validate the flow structure, then iterated to high-fidelity screens matching Parker Financial's existing brand.

Outcome

The redesigned onboarding prototype was used directly in Heroic Development's investor presentations. The key design decision that drove results: introducing a sample output screen early in the flow so users understood the value before committing to data entry.

What I Learned

• Progressive disclosure is only effective when users understand what they're progressing toward — showing the destination early changes everything.
• Complex financial tools live or die on the first five minutes. If users don't understand the value proposition immediately, they leave.
• Designing for low-tech-savvy users requires more than simplification — it requires building trust through clarity at every step.