UX Researcher & UX Designer
1 UX Researcher, 2 UI Designers
Habild is a SaaS productivity and management platform built to help users manage finances, deadlines, teams, and projects in one place. While popular tools like Asana and Notion are powerful, they can overwhelm users who need simplicity and personalization. Habild aimed to close this gap, particularly for users with ADHD who struggle with cognitive overload and require a more intuitive experience. As the UX researcher and designer on the project, I was responsible for uncovering real user needs, shaping the experience strategy, and designing an interface that balanced simplicity, flexibility, and functionality. To understand the needs of our target users, I conducted research with both B2B and B2C audiences, focusing on students, freelancers, and small teams. A core persona emerged: Jake, a college student with ADHD, whose struggles with organization reflected many pain points we aimed to solve. Another important persona, Kriti, reinforced the need for a highly visual, customizable experience that reduced friction and required minimal setup. Through empathy mapping, journey mapping, and persona development, we identified essential needs: personalization, simplicity, visual clarity, and the ability to avoid overwhelming feature sets. These research insights directly shaped the design decisions that followed.
Based on these findings, I developed a clear and minimal information architecture that prioritized easy navigation and modular flexibility. The dashboard focused on drag-and-drop widgets, pre-built templates, and the option for users to personalize layouts, colors, and components. The design system was created with over 50 screens, emphasizing clean typography, soft color palettes, and unobtrusive visual cues that guided users through tasks without demanding extra mental effort. Prototypes were tested with 600 users, and we refined the onboarding flow, widget interactions, and overall usability based on continuous feedback. This iterative process allowed us to align the experience closely with user expectations, simplifying the product without sacrificing depth.
The final product delivered a highly intuitive and personalized dashboard experience that helped users feel more in control of their tasks, deadlines, and finances. Users like Kriti were able to stay organized in ways that matched their mental models, and feedback consistently praised the simplicity and customization features. From a business perspective, Habild positioned itself to serve an underserved market, attracting users who had previously abandoned other tools due to complexity. My deliverables included complete UX research documentation, a detailed Figma design system, interactive prototypes, and developer-ready specifications. Most importantly, this project reinforced for me the power of research-driven design and the importance of building experiences that don’t just function well but fit seamlessly into people’s lives and reduce their cognitive burden.