Arken helps lawyers manage clients, wills, and legal documents. I rebuilt its UX and design system as the platform's only product designer, against a fixed external launch date.
Arken had a working platform helping lawyers manage clients and documents — but the product had grown without a consistent design foundation, and new competitors were closing in. It needed a full redesign in time for a hard external launch date.
There was no room for a slow, linear process. Research, design, and build had to move in parallel.
I was brought in as the only product designer on the project, reporting directly to the CEO.
Instead of a slow handoff chain, the three tracks moved simultaneously and iteratively, so the team kept building on an improving picture of user needs while still shipping regularly.
A structured UX evaluation of the Arken One platform, combining direct observation, user-reported feedback, and a formal heuristic evaluation against Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics.
Too much distance between components and cards throughout the pages. Padding and margins were excessive, making the layout feel bloated and harder to scan, especially on full-screen views.
Font hierarchy was inconsistent across pages, alongside other system elements that looked like they belonged to different design systems entirely.
Over time, users had quietly built their own workaround paths for accomplishing everyday tasks.
Even though it was meant to be the platform's main page, users skipped it almost entirely — analytics and news widgets just took up space.
The first iteration tested different in-product marketing placements — the goal was growing usage of other Arken products without crowding the workspace.
With four months before the launch event, findings were distilled into two How Might We questions, each tied to a metric that would define success.
Use the current design as a base for a faster first iteration — build a new design system and introduce a new style rooted in what already existed.
Prioritize UX research findings by urgency, to be launch-ready first — then keep improving after the event.
Considering the research and project objectives, I explored a few design directions for the dashboard — the platform's most-used, most-criticized surface. After several rounds of feedback, we landed on the final version.
Where it started. Dense cards, an inconsistent grid, and a "Solutions" wall competing with the client list for attention.
Testing structure. A clearer top nav and card rhythm emerge, but the layout still spreads attention across too many equally-weighted widgets.
The final version. One clear primary action, a focused recent-clients table, and secondary widgets sized to match how often people actually use them.
Four decisions shaped the final home screen — each one grounded in what research showed people actually did, not what the platform assumed they'd want.
Research showed these were the functions people relied on most, so the new version makes them unmistakably the primary widget and button on the page. The nav itself also gained a full/collapsed state, a workspace switcher, an Arken Apps entry point, and a dedicated profile & plan space.
After long research and several rounds of debate with the team and client reviews, we narrowed the dashboard to a handful of the most important signals — action items, documents created, and intestacy position — before sending people deeper into the full analytics page.
Finding a user-friendly way to surface tips, news, and new Arken products — without it reading as an ad inside someone's working tool — took real back and forth with the team before it earned a permanent spot.
Before designing anything, I went through the entire platform screen by screen to document what was breaking down for users — inconsistent patterns, unclear flows, and friction specific to each core area: dashboard, client management, onboarding, authentication, settings.
I ran interviews with the internal team and existing clients — lawyers using the platform day to day — to understand where it was failing them in practice, not just in theory. That shaped what got prioritized first.
I established the visual language and UI foundations in tandem with redesigning real screens, so the system grew from actual product needs and stayed usable under deadline pressure.
Dashboard, client management, onboarding, authentication, and settings — the areas with the highest daily usage and the most reported friction.
Instead of one big handoff, I collaborated directly with developers and the PM so new pages and fixes shipped iteratively as they were ready, keeping the project moving inside a fixed timeline.
I worked alongside an external web designer handling the marketing site to keep the product and brand experiences visually and structurally consistent, while adapting each to its own context.
In the final month, with pages still left to design, I introduced Claude into the process to speed up how fast we could go from idea to shippable page. The team — myself, the PM, and developers — used it to generate first-draft concepts and prompted wireframes for remaining pages. I took those drafts into Figma and adjusted them to match the existing system, so the result stayed consistent with everything designed earlier, while letting the whole team contribute to page concepts without bottlenecking on me alone.
A few of the other core areas redesigned as part of the same system — client records, account settings, and third-party integrations.
Typography, color, spacing, and components — established alongside the product itself, so it grew from real screens rather than an abstract exercise.
The redesign hit its launch date — and left the team with a system built to keep paying off after it.