Connecting 40,000 Senior Citizens to Their Local Community

Connecting seniors to local community through a Directory MVP that shipped during a period of 13× membership growth (3,000 → 40,000).

Quick Overview

Role & Context

Product Designer. Solo designer partnering with PM, Lead Engineer, and 4 rotating engineers.

Timeline: 20 weeks → 8 weeks → 6 weeks (scope compressed 70% mid-project)

Constraints

Platform rebuild during rebrand, rotating engineering teams, no research budget, timeline collapsed twice due to contract changes.

3 Strategic Decisions

1. Grounded design in real senior citizen behavior
   Volunteered 5 weeks with Walk with a Doc and ran 5 behavioral observation sessions watching members use their own phones and watches to understand tech comfort, trust signals, and decision habits.

2. Translated research into confidence-building discovery
   Conducted 14 surveys and 6 interviews plus behavioral observations, which surfaced first-time joiner anxiety and logistics-first decision patterns that shaped filter strategy and detail page structure.

3. Protected the discover → evaluate → save → contact loop through 2 brutal scope cuts
   Advocated to preserve the full behavioral flow over feature breadth, ensuring a shippable MVP despite cutting filters, images, the Profile page, and roughly 70% of planned scope.

MVP scope (what shipped in Jan 2025)

• Browseable Group Directory + search

• Logistics-first filters: location, cost, schedule

• Group Detail page designed to reduce uncertainty (“what to expect,” logistics upfront)

• Save entry points + clear contact CTA

• Key states as applicable: empty, no results, loading

Impact

• 13x membership growth: 3,000 → 40,000 members by July 2025 (shared internally post-departure; confirmed via Chief Product Officer).

• Design system acceleration: Co-built Figma + Storybook component library (12 → 22 components) used across Directory, onboarding, and back office.

• Sales enablement (executive-reported): CPO shared that Optum referenced Directory as a partnership differentiator.

Research

With no research budget, I used Walk with a Doc, a free weekly walking program, as a research channel, combining 14 surveys, 6 interviews, and 5 in-the-wild behavioral observation sessions watching members use their own phones and watches. This gave me direct access to the audience in a natural setting and grounded decisions in real senior citizen behavior: tech comfort levels, trust signals, and how members actually made decisions about joining something new.

Two insights drove the core design decisions. First, uncertainty was the primary barrier to joining. Members needed to answer "Will this work for me?" before investing emotional energy, so filters were designed around logistics and fit cues like schedule, location, intensity, accessibility, and group size rather than search efficiency. Second, first-time joiner anxiety was universal. Members needed trust before commitment, so the Group Detail page was structured around the questions participants repeatedly asked: "What happens when I arrive?" "Will I fit in?" "What do I need to bring?"

MVP & Tradeoffs

Research that I conducted showed members rarely commit on first exposure - they discover, evaluate fit, save promising options, and return before contacting a leader. I partnered with Product and Engineering to define an MVP anchored in that loop: discover → evaluate → save → contact. Features like email nudges, communication tools, and personalization were intentionally deferred as each introduced dependencies that would have risked the core loop shipping, and each was documented so the team retained future optionality.

Flows

I mapped end-to-end flows for the Directory landing, group detail, and saved groups experiences, ensuring each path had a clear next step and that empty and no-results states were accounted for. I reviewed feasibility early with engineering so flows could scale with the platform.

Low-Fidelity Exploration

Given the audience, I designed for readability, predictability, and confidence: clear hierarchy with logistics first, large and consistent CTAs, plain-language labels, and guidance for empty and no-results states. I prioritized legibility and contrast for key actions and used "what to expect" content to reduce first-time joiner anxiety.

Directory browse/search page

I explored three layouts to balance filter visibility with usability. V1 used a sidebar with list view -- familiar, but the narrow sidebar limited filter visibility and heavy scrolling made comparison difficult. V2 moved filters to a top expandable panel which reduced clutter, but hiding filters added friction when members needed to see multiple criteria at once. V3 led with a map and encouraged location-based discovery, but members made decisions using multiple factors, so map-first required too many clicks to surface deal-breakers. I refined V1 by widening the sidebar to keep critical filters visible at all times and switched to a card grid so logistics were scannable and comparison easier, matching the observed "eliminate quickly" decision pattern.

Group Detail Page

I explored three structures to support the feasibility → confidence → action decision sequence. V1 used a compact single-column layout with quick logistics, a "What to Expect" checklist, and clear contact guidance. V2 used a persistent sidebar that created an artificial hierarchy between feasibility and confidence-building content when both were equally critical. V3 was the most comprehensive but risked overwhelming members who needed fast feasibility confirmation. V1 won because it answered "Can I attend?" immediately, then reduced anxiety with scannable expectations -- and it held up best under scope reductions because the structure could be trimmed while preserving the decision sequence.

Profile/Saved Groups Page

I explored accordion sections, horizontal tabs, and vertical navigation to balance logistics visibility with simplicity. As the Dashboard stabilized, saved groups moved there as the primary post-login destination -- they were an active discovery tool, not passive account management, and that placement better matched observed behavior.

Design Iteration

Between lo-fi validation and hi-fi execution, two stakeholder concerns shaped refinements.

Filter scalability for growth
The PM raised a discoverability concern as the activity list was expected to grow significantly - all activity types were enclosed in a dropdown, making them hard to browse. I proposed a hybrid: top activity types as browsable chips, with a scalable dropdown handling the rest. It solved both problems without sacrificing either goal.

Saved groups visibility
A stakeholder flagged that saved groups needed more prominence than the accordion pattern allowed, and that members shouldn't risk accidentally closing the tab. I extracted groups from the accordion and used sectional tabs to anchor them at the top of the page.

High-fidelity design

Once lo-fi structure was validated, I executed high-fidelity screens that balanced immediate member needs with platform scalability. Visual refinement happened primarily through the component system co-built with the Lead Engineer like buttons, cards, and badges defined once in Storybook and applied consistently across Directory to improve coherence and accelerate implementation.

Landing Page

Pre-launch delivery validation 

The Directory rebuild faced two major scope reductions due to contract changes and engineering constraints. Across both cuts, the priority was protecting a loop that could ship and be measured: discover → evaluate → save → contact.

Scope Cuts

Scope cut 1: Mid-implementation contract change

Halfway through development, a contract change required immediate descoping. Filters, images, card attributes, and the full Profile page were cut. I advocated to move saved groups into the Dashboard "My Groups" section rather than scratch save behavior entirely -- protecting the return path without building a separate profile experience meant members could still bookmark groups and access them from their primary post-login destination.

Landing Page - Scope Cut 1

Saved Groups - Scope Cut 1

Landing Page - Scope Cut 2

Second Scope Cut - Week One of Revised MVP

Shortly into the revised build, engineering scheduling required additional cuts. The sidebar filters were reduced to search and zip code only, card attributes were stripped, and the logistics summary moved into the page body. I preserved contact information on detail pages and maintained save and share throughout -- keeping the actions most critical for participation even as everything around them was simplified.

Design QA

I led design QA through daily reviews of staged builds, triaging defects in Jira with the PM and partnering with engineering to prioritize visual polish so the product shipped at a high quality standard despite extreme scope compression.

Design System Foundations

Noticing inconsistencies across the product early, I partnered with the Lead Engineer to establish a shared Figma and Storybook component library. I advocated for Storybook specifically - not just a Figma library - so engineering had a development-ready reference, handoff documentation could link directly to built components, and patterns could standardize as the product scaled. The library grew from 12 to 22 components as Directory work surfaced new patterns, and was used across Directory, onboarding, and back office.

Outcome

By July 2025, membership grew from roughly 3,000 to 40,000 (shared internally after I left, confirmed via the Chief Product Officer). The Directory shipped during this period as a key discovery surface for new members. Logistics-first filters and "what to expect" detail pages made fit easier to assess and reduced the uncertainty that had been keeping members from joining. The CPO also shared that Optum referenced the Directory as a partnership differentiator in enterprise conversations (communicated internally; I wasn't present).

Instrumentation to track filter usage, save rates, and contact clicks was planned during the initial MVP scope but delayed by the final scope cut. Before leaving, I documented the measurement plan and v2 priorities which were personalization and communication features deferred from the MVP, so the team could pick up where the work left off.

Takeaways

Shipping under extreme compression taught me that protecting a core behavioral loop is more valuable than preserving feature breadth. Every cut decision came back to whether the discover → evaluate → save → contact path stayed intact. Working without a research budget pushed me toward more creative methods, and the Walk with a Doc sessions ended up being some of the most grounding research I've done. Keeping documentation and communication current throughout a high-flux build wasn't overhead, it was what kept design and implementation aligned when everything else was moving.