Boldin

A financial planning platform that helps users create, manage, and optimize retirement plans through scenarios, insights, and tracking.

Discipline

UX and Product

Feature Squads

Consumer (D2C)

Team

Product Manager
Engineering (FE & BE)
Content Strategist
QA

INTRODUCTION: ABOUT BOLDIN

Background

Boldin is a retirement and financial planning platform that empowers users to make smarter decisions about their savings, investments, and income strategies. Our primary users are pre-retirees and retirees, often working with advisors, who want full transparency and control over their financial futures. Business goals focused on increasing user confidence, retention, and premium plan upgrades by enhancing decision-making tools within the platform.

Laying the foundation

I led efforts to evolve the Boldin design system — driving consistency, accessibility, and scalability across the platform.

Typography: Introduced ES Klarheit Grotesk for a clean, trustworthy aesthetic
Color Palette: Expanded the system with vibrant yet professional tones — including mint, dark green, and ink.
Component Library: Standardized UI elements like labels, metrics, and CTAs to create a unified experience across financial tools

THE CHALLENGE

Withdrawal Order Optimization

Deciding which accounts to withdraw from — and when — can make or break a retirement plan. While Boldin offered robust planning tools, users had little control over how their savings were drawn down.
Withdrawal strategies vary widely, but the right approach is highly personal, depending on each user's unique financial goals and circumstances.

With the problem defined, we turned to users to better understand their goals, frustrations, and expectations around retirement withdrawals.

Identifying user painpoints

Through direct user feedback, support tickets, and community posts, we uncovered recurring pain points around withdrawal flexibility:

• Users wanted to specify which accounts to withdraw from first.
• Lack of control over the drawdown strategy caused trust issues with the plan.
• Users approaching or in retirement desired clear, actionable guidance on optimizing withdrawals.

Not flexible

“Not being able to specify funding source is a deal breaker for me..”

More customization needed

I want to withdraw from my brokerage account first, before
starting distributions from my retirement account.”

Need for guidance

"Without control over the withdrawal order, it feels like I’m guessing how to manage my savings — I need more guidance and flexibility."

THE PROBLEM WE NEED TO SOLVE

How might we empower users to optimize their withdrawal order — minimizing taxes, extending savings longevity, and building trust in the plan?

Armed with key user insights, I explored multiple design directions — balancing automation, user control, and ease of understanding — to best address user needs.

THE SOLUTION

Design Concept 1a: Dynamic Solver

Automatically recommends the best withdrawal strategy based on financial goals.
Users would be able to select goals like:
• Lowest Lifetime Taxes
• Highest Retirement Chance of Success
• Highest Estate Value

I introduced the concept of goal-based optimization. In this logic diagram, Goal 1 is lowest lifetime taxes. The user selects that goal, and the platform, powered by FPE (Financial Planning engine, the brains of the platform) would dynamically determine which canned withdrawal order strategy best supports that outcome or goal. So instead of just one-size-fits-all, we're now scanning several strategies and outputting the best order for them.

This concept helps users avoid having to pick from technical strategies like proportional, reverse traditional while still offering transparency and control.

Design Concept 1b: Explorer

In this iteration, I wanted to explore another key idea — that some users really want to compare different withdrawal strategies side by side to see what actually works best for their goals.

Design Concept 2: User Control

This concept let users manually prioritize and rearrange withdrawal accounts via drag-and-drop. If users understand the value of an optimized withdrawal order, they’ll be more likely to upgrade or renew. Also

As part of the solution, I designed a Withdrawal Insight Report — giving users a transparent, detailed view of how and when their savings would be drawn down over time.
The report allowed users to track annual withdrawals, see which accounts would fund their expenses each year, and understand the impact of their chosen withdrawal order.
This transparency helped build trust in the platform's recommendations and empowered users, especially those working with advisors, to make informed decisions about their retirement planning.

User testing results

The Withdrawal Insight Report tested strongly across all sessions.
Participants quickly understood the purpose of the report and appreciated the clarity it provided around their withdrawal timelines and account drawdowns.

Key feedback themes included:

High confidence: Users felt reassured seeing a detailed breakdown of when and from which accounts their withdrawals would happen.

Perceived transparency: The visualizations helped users trust the platform's projections and strategies more fully.

Ease of understanding: Most users could navigate and interpret the report without requiring additional explanation.

Overall, the report reinforced trust, addressed key user pain points around "black box" calculations, and validated the decision to prioritize transparency and education in the withdrawal experience.

Final Solution

After exploring both concepts, I ultimately moved forward with Concept 2 — User Control. While the dynamic strategy offered smart automation and simplicity, user feedback revealed a strong need for transparency and flexibility, especially among advanced users and those working with financial advisors. Users were hesitant to trust a system they couldn't fully see into, particularly when it came to critical calculations around their finances.

Additionally, users expressed a strong preference for a comprehensive report — allowing them to deep dive into their withdrawal timeline, understand which accounts were being tapped, and when.

Metrics of success & improvements

Impact

■ 40% of Plus users interacted with the new feature within 30 days

■ 26% upgrade rate from Basic users who explored it

■ 18% drop in monthly cancellations after launch

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