Outcomes
We turned retirement planning from overwhelming to empowering—helping over 120K users confidently navigate the future. With a 4.5-star app store rating and an educational feature that increased engagement 7.5x, we proved that clarity and trust drive real impact.
Role
As the sole designer, I led 0→1 product development—from user research and concept validation to end-to-end UX, UI, and product design. I partnered closely with product and engineering to shape the roadmap, define hypotheses, and build a category-defining retirement experience.
Challenge
The Problem
For Americans 50+, retirement isn’t a single decision—it’s a web of interconnected choices across finances, healthcare, housing, and lifestyle. Yet the current landscape is deeply fragmented:
Scattered advice across Google, PDFs, and advisors
Hidden details behind paywalls or sales funnels
Siloed services that don't help users see how decisions impact one another
This left users confused, overwhelmed, and hesitant to act.
The Opportunity
The lack of a clear, centralized resource meant users either delayed key decisions or turned to high-cost advisors. For Silvur, the opportunity was clear: if we could become the trusted, go-to source for planning, we could unlock a massive, underserved market.
Our Hypothesis
If we created a transparent, interactive experience that helped users understand how retirement decisions interconnected, we could build confidence, drive engagement, and create a differentiated experience for a segment that often feels overlooked.
Approach
Driving Early Discovery
I led product discovery from the ground up—planning and running user interviews, synthesizing insights, and collaborating closely with our PM to define key hypotheses and validate product features with real users before we built. Working with engineering, I built early prototypes to test feasibility and usability.
Initial MVPs explored financial milestones and lifestyle goals, but user feedback was clear:
"How does this all fit together?"
We needed a single, intuitive framework that showed how their decisions connected.
Finding the Hook: Retirement Score
That insight led to our first breakthrough: the Retirement Score. I designed an interactive feature that visualized how long your money could last in retirement and how key decisions (like retirement age or Social Security timing) affected the outcome.
This feature took a few simple questions about a user's age and financial situation and turned it int a simple tool that gave them a birds-eye view of the interconnected decisions that they might be making in retirement.
Tradeoff: We debated going deeper into simulations, but prioritized simplicity and clarity to reduce cognitive load.
Result: This became the top-performing feature in user surveys and the primary driver of downloads and early adoption.
"[The Retirement Score] helps me see where I stand—like, okay, now I get where I’m at. Then I can dig in, learn more, make some decisions, and even come back and tweak things based on what I’ve learned."
Adding Ongoing Value: Retirement School
After proving we could drive adoption, we focused on increasing retention. I led a cross-functional ideation sprint to identify next-step features, then prototyped and tested two frontrunners:
Daily financial tracking tools (budgeting, saving)
Bite-sized educational content
User testing revealed that budgeting needs were already being met elsewhere, but educational content was the gap.
This lead us to build Retirement School—a library of short, digestible lessons optimized for mobile. We focused on clarity, readability, and key decision points like Medicare, Social Security, and 401(k) withdrawals. I led content design, UX, and interaction patterns, launching iteratively and optimizing based on engagement data.
Results and Impact
4.5-Star App Store Rating: Received high user ratings for its value and ease of use.
120K+ Active Users: Scaled to over 120,000 active users, proving strong product-market fit.
Increased Engagement: Through iterative experimentation and user testing, we grew time spent in the app by 7.5x, and uses per month grew 3.5x, largely driven by features like Retirement School.
Business Impact: Positioned the app as a trusted, integrated resource, helping users make informed, interconnected decisions about retirement.
"We’re financially savvy, yet we’ve learned so much from Silvur. It’s the most valuable free tool we’ve ever used, and it’s helping us make real changes to our retirement plan."
