Fin-Tech · Healthcare · Non-Profit
Fresh Connect
Analytics and reporting for a HIPAA-compliant food prescription platform, built to scale from a regional pilot to national expansion.
My Role
Lead Product Designer
Team
Director of Product, Product Manager, Two External Dev Teams
Focus
Dashboard Design · Data Visualization Reporting UX · Design Systems
01
Overview & Problem
A food prescription platform facing rapid national scale
Fresh Connect was a 3-year-old, HIPAA-compliant, tech-enabled food prescription program empowering patients with the money and flexibility to buy the foods they need to be healthy. Its web app platform allowed healthcare partners and providers to enroll cardholders, manage financials, and provide cardholder success to patients.
A planned nationwide expansion, including new retailers and an estimated quadrupling of cardholders in a single year, created an urgent need for expanded, automated reporting tools. Much of the reporting was being done ad hoc, by hand.
The existing dashboard had become inaccurate due to lagging data updates. It had to be pulled down entirely and revamped before the expansion could proceed.
We needed to solve three core problems:
Running cardholder engagement reports was the top user task, but it was buried under many clicks, and multiple report types existed that people rarely found useful.
People were forced to sort and filter data manually in Excel to fully run reports, adding friction and error risk.
No high-level dashboard existed to proactively answer key program health questions. People had to hunt for answers.
02
My Role & Process
From paper sketches to a stakeholder-ready prototype
As Lead Product Designer, I owned the end-to-end design process, from initial research synthesis through prototyping, user testing, and developer handoff. The Director of Product captured a month's worth of inbound customer requests while the dashboard was offline, giving us a rich qualitative foundation to design against.
Research
Customer request synthesis
I worked from one month of inbound requests captured by the Director of Product, supplemented by my heuristic evaluation and UX audit of the existing platform.
Exploration
Multi-fidelity sketching
I sketched extensively on paper, in Figma, and in PowerPoint, iterating toward a narrative, actionable dashboard concept before committing to pixels.
Testing
Grayscale prototype testing
I used intentionally colorless graphs in the first test round to focus feedback on data story and hierarchy, not aesthetics. I ran standardized sessions with 3 customers and 3 internal stakeholders.
Iteration
Stakeholder-driven refinement
I ran multiple design review rounds with internal stakeholders and developers to narrow widget scope and sharpen the interaction model before final handoff.
03
Key Design Decisions
Designing for the data story, not the data dump
User testing gave me clear direction. People needed both percentages and absolute numbers in context, they wanted baselines to understand performance, and the two most critical metrics were Shopping Activity and Fund Utilization.
Surface the right report first. I restructured the reporting IA to bring cardholder engagement reports, the top user task, front and center, removing the multi-click journey entirely.
Pair percentages with absolutes. Research showed people couldn't make decisions from percentages alone. I redesigned every key metric to show both the relative and absolute figure in context.
Baseline comparisons as a core pattern. People consistently asked "are we performing well?" so I made baseline reference lines and period-over-period comparisons a first-class design element throughout the dashboard.
Grayscale-first prototype testing. I deliberately stripped color from the first round of testing to keep feedback focused on whether the data story was being told correctly, before aesthetics entered the conversation.
We used the final prototype in all-hands presentations for internal awareness, and in sales and fundraising demos. This is the value of a well-crafted design artifact beyond engineering handoff.
04
Outcomes & Impact
A functional foundation built to scale
Mid-project, we discovered data loss when onboarding a new external development team. We had to find a pragmatic path forward. Despite that setback, the redesign delivered meaningful progress and laid the groundwork for future iteration.
Actionable dashboard
The new dashboard contained directly actionable items, replacing a static and inaccurate legacy view.
Partner personalization
Co-branding and partner personalization features became immediately achievable on the new foundation.
Bespoke design system
I established a new, updated design system during this project, setting a consistent visual language for all future iterations.
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