Digital Estate Planning Platform
A living trust platform that lets clients complete their entire estate plan online, from sign-up through attorney review to e-notarized, delivered documents, without ever visiting an office.
Role: Freelance UX/UI Design Lead Client: Law firm (name withheld for client privacy)
TimeBox: 6–9 months to launch in 2023, plus ongoing refinement
Tools: Figma, Photoshop, Miro, Confluence/Notion
Design Challenge
Design an online living trust: turn a complex, legal, deeply personal process, choosing who raises your children and who manages your estate, into something a client can complete accurately and confidently online, with the same trust and care as sitting across from an attorney in person.
Design Opportunity
The firm's website was just a brochure page: a short description of their services and a form where you would leave your contact info so an attorney could call you back. Everything after that happened offline, filling out your details, choosing beneficiaries and trustees, meeting with an attorney, and signing documents, all by phone or in person. COVID made in-person meetings impossible and opened the door to rebuild this as a guided digital product from the ground up.
Target Users
Individuals and couples ready to set up a living trust but who don't want to navigate dense legal paperwork alone or pay for multiple in-person attorney visits, including people with disabilities and those facing situations like COVID, where getting to an attorney's office isn't easy or safe. They value clear guidance, affordability, and the reassurance of real attorney support without leaving home.
The Solution
The solution is a fully guided online living trust platform: sign up, work through a step-by-step intake wizard covering beneficiaries, trustees, guardians, and power of attorney, schedule a real attorney meeting, then review and e-notarize your finished documents, all without leaving home. Complex legal decisions are broken into simple, manageable steps, with a built-in notes panel so questions never get lost. The overall goal is to make estate planning feel as reassuring and personal online as it would sitting across from an attorney in person.
Features
Intake Wizard
Users are guided step-by-step through beneficiaries, trustees, guardians, and power of attorney, turning a complex legal process into simple, manageable screens.
Notes Panel
Users can jot down questions as they go, so nothing gets forgotten before the attorney meeting.
Attorney Scheduling
Users can book a real meeting with a licensed attorney directly from the platform to review their choices before finalizing documents.
Document Review & E-Notarization
Users can review their completed documents and e-notarize them online, completing the entire process without an in-person visit.
Process
I sat down with the attorney behind the platform to understand the full living trust process firsthand, then ran a few brainstorming sessions to work through where the process broke down for clients. That research became a journey map, tracing the client's path from sign-up to notarized documents and surfacing the pain points along the way. From there, I built a flowchart of the intake wizard's logic, including the extra steps that appear automatically if someone is married or has children, without adding friction for everyone else.
Journey Map
Flowchart
Design Exploration
Before landing on the final direction, I sketched an early wireframe for the homepage, then pushed it into a higher-fidelity concept to test tone and messaging with the attorney.
The Flow in Action
These are the actual screens from the live platform, shown in the order a client moves through them: sign up, enter their information, pay the plan fee, then complete the wizard steps like executors and powers of attorney. They can schedule a real meeting with the attorney at any point along the way, and once everything is signed and notarized, every document lands in one library they can come back to anytime.
Post-Launch Refinements
Once the platform launched, real use by the attorney and early clients surfaced a couple of usability gaps that got fixed quickly. The document checklist originally showed each document as a small thumbnail image, but as more document types were added, the thumbnails stopped fitting cleanly on screen; that was replaced with a simple list and checkboxes instead. Clients also had no single place to view their documents once notarized, so a documents library was added afterwards, giving them one place to access every signed file.
Takeaways
This project pushed me to design for real stakes, not hypothetical ones. Estate planning touches some of the most personal decisions someone will make, like who raises their kids, who manages their money, and what happens after they're gone. Turning that into a guided online experience meant balancing warmth and reassurance with the precision a legal process demands, and doing it alongside a practicing attorney instead of a stand-in client.
Show people it can really be done online. Trusting a legal process to a website is a big ask, so we added a short video on the landing page walking through how the whole thing works, start to finish. Seeing the process laid out helped people believe it before they ever created an account.
Make expert help easy to reach. Even with a guided wizard, people still had real questions before they were ready to commit. We added a phone number right on the site so anyone could call and talk to the attorney directly and get their questions answered before signing up.
Design for real constraints, not ideal ones. I wasn't starting from a blank slate. There was an existing brand, a live business, and a legal process that couldn't just be simplified away. The best solutions came from working within those boundaries: reusing what already worked, fixing what broke once real users hit it, like the document checklist that stopped scaling, and adding what was missing once it became obvious in practice, like the documents library. Shipping something real and then improving it with real feedback taught me more than getting every decision perfect upfront ever could have.
Thanks for reading!