Lumen

Lumen's original dashboard was built in eighteen months of sprints with no design owner. Customers could not find transfers, support was fielding 400 tickets a week on navigation alone, and the mobile view had been abandoned entirely. Growth had stalled at 60,000 users and churn was climbing.

We ran two weeks of interviews with 24 customers and four support agents, then instrumented the existing product to see where sessions actually died. Ninety-one percent of support tickets clustered around three screens. The problem was not features — it was that the information architecture mirrored Lumen's internal team structure rather than anything a customer would recognise.

We rebuilt the hierarchy around four jobs: check balance, move money, understand spending, get help. Every other feature became secondary navigation. A full design system followed — 62 components, tokens for colour, type and spacing, and documented states for loading, empty and error, which the old product had never defined.

The front end was rebuilt in Next.js with server components for the account overview, so the first meaningful paint no longer waited on six API calls. We introduced a typed API layer over Lumen's existing Node services, added optimistic UI for transfers, and shipped behind feature flags so the rollout could be staged across 5%, 25% and 100% of users.

A single-surface dashboard with instant account switching, a transfer flow reduced from nine steps to three, and spending insight generated automatically from transaction categories rather than asking customers to tag anything themselves.

Support tickets fell 41% in the first quarter. Task completion for transfers rose 63%. Median load time dropped from 3.4 seconds to 0.9. Lumen passed 100,000 users four months after launch, and the design system is now used by three internal teams.