Web app · Product design & design systems
Ledgerly
A finance dashboard that trades charts for plain answers
- Role
- Senior product designer
- Platform
- Responsive web
- Year
- 2024
- Outcome
- 2× feature adoption
Ledgerly helps freelancers see whether they can afford next month. The original dashboard was a wall of charts that users screenshotted and sent to friends asking “is this good?”. I redesigned it around the questions people actually ask of their money.
The problem
Usability sessions made it uncomfortable to watch: users hovered over charts, read tooltips aloud, and still could not say whether they were okay. The data was accurate and the answers were absent.
Freelance income is lumpy, so month-over-month charts mostly communicated noise. What users wanted was judgment: can I cover rent, should I chase invoices, is this quarter on track.
Process
I ran a card sort of 40 money questions with 22 freelancers, then rewrote the dashboard as a stack of answered questions — each one a sentence first, evidence second. The chart became the footnote instead of the headline.
With engineering we built a “confidence” model into the design language: answers state their assumptions (“if your usual invoices arrive on time…”) instead of pretending precision.
The solution
The new home screen leads with three sentences: what you can safely spend, what is at risk, and what needs an action this week. Every sentence unfolds into the underlying numbers for people who want to audit the reasoning.
A small design system — answer cards, risk tints, assumption notes — kept the pattern consistent as other teams adopted it for taxes and invoicing.
Outcome
Adoption of the actions surfaced by the dashboard doubled, and “what does this mean” support conversations dropped sharply. The answer-first pattern shipped across three more product areas within a year.