Graphic Design and User Resources

Soundboard

June-August 2024

Tools: Figma, Notability

I worked with the Customer Resources team to design guides, checklists, and flyers to be handed out to their clients. Click through the tabs below to see my work!

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Common Tax Deductions Flyer

This flyer was designed using Figma and Photoshop and was distributed to customers to visualize what kinds of tax deductions they may be eligible for as solo entreprenuers.

I worked with the Customer Resources team, which provided me a Word document listing out all the tax deductions. It was my job to format all of the deductions into a one-page flyer. I reworded and formatted all of the information to be legible and fit into one page.

I used Adobe Stock and Photoshop to make the icons and I used Figma to make the rest of the flyer. I met with the Customer Resources team and the Products team almost every day for feedback, which resulted in 4 in-progress versions of this flyer until it was shown to customers!

From this project, I learned how to structure information, especially to serve the needs of specific customers. For example, solo entreprenuers often don't have the time to look up every tax deduction they can save on, and often don't even know they exist, which is why we kept the information simple and limited to one page. I also learned a few neat graphic design features of Figma!

BOIR Guide

This guide was designed using Figma and was distributed to customers to give them step-by-step guidance on how to complete the Beneficial Ownership Information Report (BOIR), which is a new report that many small business must complete annually.

I worked with the Customer Resources team and received later feedback from the Products team. I was given videos and articles that explained what the report was about and I went through the report myself to understand what the process was like. For my guide, I captured screenshots from the report, and formatted them with instructions. My goal was to present the information as clearly as possible, especially for people who didn't know what the report was and didn't have the time to figure out how to fill it out.

I met with the Customer Resources team for feedback almost every day and ended up going through 5 iterations of the guide. I had never formatted information in the form of a guide before, so this project taught me how to present and plan information over longer formats.

Onboarding Checklist and Timeline

This checklist was designed using Figma and was distributed to customers to give them a checklist for their first month at Soundboard. The timeline was for customers to visualize company interactions every month.

I worked with the Customer Resources team and received later feedback from the Products team. I was given a document with an unstructured list of steps and monthly dates. My job was to structure all of it into a checklist for customers to reference in their first month with the company. This was an important task because this is one of the first documents customers see from the company and dictates first impressions of how organized and visually pleasing the company is.

I met with the Customer Resources team for feedback almost every day. A major challenge was fitting the information they gave me into a one-pager without making it incoherent. We went through 6 iterations of different document structures with varying degrees of legibility, until we mutually decided to split the information into two pages: checklist and timeline.

I ran into more difficult design choices with this new direction, because the information in the checklist was much more than the timeline. I needed to convey that some aspects of the timeline were asynchronous and some not, and fit a relatively long list of information onto one page that was spaced out enough to be "checked off." After experimentation and rewording, I was able to fit all of the checklist items into a vertical column that had enough room to have checkboxes, and split off the synchronous and asynchronous actions into separate but continuous sections.

It was also challenging to design a linear timeline that would fill up an entire page and would convey recurring monthly actions. Ultimately, I used a combination of unique layouts and graphics to create a coherent timeline. This project taught me a lot about adapting information and design choices to fit with each other in a legible way. I had to make many compromises with both visual layout and written information, and still tie them together into an aesthetically comprehensible yet informative format. I learned how to use Figma to create elements to fill up space and I experimented with fill, stroke, corners, and more specific yet impactful design choices.

Website Sketches

These sketches were designed using Notability and guided the final graphics on the company website's home page.

This was the first project I worked on entirely with the Products team. We started off outlining the three concepts we wanted to represent: 1) books preparation, 2) tax assessment timeline, and 3) tax estimates and filing. We individually sketched up our ideas and met up later in the day to compare. We agreed on the sketch ideas that represented the concepts best, and my job was to draw high fidelity sketches up to be integrated into the website.

After some experimentation, I found Notability to be the best tool to draw simple technical sketches with, due to its ability to draw straight lines, shapes, and fill shapes. After I finished the sketches, I checked back in with the team for feedback and snet the sketches to another member of the Products team to render the graphics for the website.

I learned the power of simple design and low level prototyping. I also learned how to adapt limited tools for more complex work. I adjusted to a new team structure, and appreciated their open-minded creative process.