Notification Center: designing a platform-wide feature that users said they didn't want
Notification Center is a generic, reusable component that surfaces every notification from every domain across the platform. built for internal advisors, external advisors, and bank partners.
Impact
Challenge
Unlike most projects, the demand for Notification Center didn't come from users. it came from stakeholders. They were convinced the feature had real value: a single, generic component that could surface every notification from every domain across the platform in one place.
Users, on the other hand, hadn't asked for it and weren't convinced they needed it. The challenge wasn't just designing the component, it was figuring out what would actually make it valuable enough that advisors would want to use it, rather than building something stakeholders wanted and users would ignore.
Approach
Discover: Aligning stakeholders, users, and every domain on the platform
Discovery started with a stakeholder session to align on terminology and understand how they envisioned Notification Center working in the future. From there, I ran an interview with five advisors to understand how they would actually use a notification center and what would make it genuinely useful to them, rather than just another thing competing for their attention. Because Notification Center pulls in notifications from every domain on the platform, I then met individually with the product owners of each domain to find out which notifications they wanted to surface and which ones actually mattered. the input needed to decide what belonged in the component at all.
Design & test: Designing for clarity at a glance
With users skeptical of the feature's value going in, the design had to earn its place immediately; clean and noticeable at first sight, with nothing that felt like added noise. I used Figma Make alongside standard wireframing and prototyping to work through the component's states and behavior.
Launch & irritate: Piloting before a platform-wide rollout
Notification Center hasn't launched yet. The plan is to release it to a handful of pilot groups first, learn from how they actually use it, and iterate before rolling it out more broadly across the platform.