Guided Career Growth Platform
The project
Designed the first public-facing iteration of Leeg's career growth platform, focused on improving clarity, engagement, and providing meaningful insight for professionals seeking structured and actionable personal growth support.
My role
Collaborated on a two-person team for Leeg to define core flows, test with users, and design high-fidelity UI ready for developer handoff.
Project duration
5 weeks
Tools
Figma
Claude and ChatGPT (research synthesis)
Summary
Why this matters
Leeg was built to add structure to career growth, but the initial experience wasn't making it easy for users to build the habits the platform was designed around.
What Leeg needs
Clarity before engagement: Users need to understand the product before they can build habits inside it.
Guided momentum: Every interaction needs a clear next step that keeps users moving forward without decision fatigue or choice paralysis.
Meaningful feedback: Users need to feel their actions are building toward something real, not just completing tasks.
The solution
We transformed Leeg into an intuitive and motivating growth experience by simplifying user flows, clarifying insights, and helping users connect daily actions to long-term career development.
Project Kickoff
What is Leeg?
Leeg is a career development platform built on the idea that consistent daily habits compound into meaningful professional growth over time. The platform is anchored by three core features:
Reflections captures daily reflections on what energized, challenged, and taught the user each day
Boosts build skills through bite-sized learning moments and focused, actionable exercises
Goals let the users set and track long-term professional development targets
Experiencing Leeg firsthand
Before starting the design process, my teammate and I each walked through the existing app independently, experiencing it as a first-time user would.
Friction points
Theme 1: Consistency gaps in the onboarding create cognitive friction
Theme 2: Dashboard lacks personalization and momentum signals (e.g., no streak, no goal context, no CTA)
Theme 3: Feedback moments need to feel like coaching, not UI. Onboarding should feel warm and intentional.
Defining the problem
POV statement
Growth-oriented professionals need engagement that feels useful in the moment because they are more likely to stay motivated when each interaction helps them clarify direction, not just consume content.
How might we…
build a clear, motivating daily engagement experience that makes users feel rewarded and connected to their progress?
Research & Strategy
What are competitors doing?
The Leeg team pointed us toward Duolingo, Strava, Headspace, Calm, and LinkedIn as reference points. Duolingo, Headspace, and Calm were the most instructive as platforms that guided users toward a clear next step and made progress feel tangible.
Who we designed for
Leeg provided two user archetypes to frame its target audience, the Ambitious Builder (18-35, early to mid-career) and the Recalibrater (30-45, mid-career). Both are motivated to grow but struggle to translate that into consistent action.
Gathering pattern references
To bridge research and design, we compiled visuals from competitor platforms that highlighted the patterns we wanted to bring into Leeg. This gave us a shared visual language to work from and a concrete artifact to present to the client.
Mapping the experience
Before moving into wireframes, we aligned on two core flows and I mapped them out to establish the foundation of the experience. One reframed onboarding as a profile-building experience, and the other outlined the daily engagement loop.
Research takeaways
Theme 1: The Ambitious Builder is the user to design for. Structuring the experience around their need for guidance, momentum, and meaningful feedback would serve both archetypes without alienating either.
Theme 2: Clarity is a prerequisite for engagement. Users cannot build habits inside a product they cannot navigate confidently.
Theme 3: Successful habit loops are guided, not open ended. Duolingo, Headspace, and Calm all removed the burden of deciding what to do next. Leeg needed to do the same.
Exploration
We focused our lo-fi wireframes on the areas most critical to the daily engagement loop. After aligning with the Leeg team we moved into high fidelity, refining the experience through multiple rounds of iteration in close collaboration with the Leeg team.
While goals, profile, and career insights were secondary to the daily engagement loop, the Leeg team recognized the need to bring those features into the hi-fi prototypes to create a more holistic experience.
Testing the Experience
With a total of 11 participants, our testing process focused on the platforms' core interactions: onboarding, daily engagement, goal-setting, and career profile insights. We supplemented our testing scenarios with an A/B testing session of homepage layouts and interactions patterns.
Key insights
Insight 1: ~70% of all usability issues stemmed from unclear language or expectations, confirming clarity as the primary problem
Insight 2: Participants consistently preferred Boosts and Goals over Reflections, which felt effort-heavy with an unclear payoff
Insight 3: Insights were universally seen as valuable but overwhelming in their current form
Insight 4: Users expected guidance and direction but the product required self-interpretation, creating a significant mental model gap
Priority Iterations
Iterating for clarity
The majority of our changes focused on clarity. We added contextual guidance, descriptive headers, and clearer visual differentiation between interaction states to reduce the language and expectation gaps that surfaced most frequently during testing. These changes aimed to help users orient themselves without tedious trial and error.
Iterating for action
Our other major iteration addressed actionability. Rather than presenting insights as static summaries, we redesigned the experience to surface next steps and personalized recommendations, giving users a clearer sense of what to do with what they were seeing.
Final Design
What started as a product users could easily get lost in became one that guides them at every step.
Through a restructured onboarding experience, clearer daily engagement loop, and insights summary that tells users what to do next, we gave Leeg's users a clear sense of where to go and why each interaction was worth their time.
Personalize your growth journey
Users share their career stage, goals, and growth areas to create a more tailored and supportive development experience from day one.
Reflect on what drives you
Users can complete quick daily check-ins to identify patterns in what energizes them or drains them, turning self-reflection into actionable career insights.
Build skills in small moments
Boosts make professional development feel approachable by helping users strengthen soft skills through quick, digestible exercises.
Turning ambitions into actions
Users can organize long-term goals into manageable milestones and tasks, creating clearer direction and accountability in their career growth.
Understand your professional growth
Personalized insights visualize users' progress over time and provide guidance on areas of strength, improvement, and future development opportunities.
Reflection
One of the biggest surprises of this project was the level of ownership we had over the experience. Within Leeg's brand identity, we had real freedom to shape how the product worked, and that trust pushed us to be more intentional about every decision.
We also brought AI into our workflow, using Notion AI, ChatGPT, and Claude to speed up documentation and research synthesis, which left more time for strategy and design.
With one round of testing, we could see where users got lost, but not whether they would keep coming back. Participants found Reflections effort-heavy, but they are core to Leeg's daily loop, so we kept them as designed. If I continued this work, I would test how the loop holds up over several weeks, and whether clearer insights make reflecting feel worth the effort.
Ultimately, this project reminded me that good UX is less about adding features and more about making what exists feel inevitable. The best decision we made was grounding our work in the idea that users should never have to wonder what to do next.
