Life.IO
Mapping a clearer digital experience for NEXT by Pacific Life.
Scope: Create a clearer, connected digital experience for NEXT by Pacific Life across insurance and financial planning.
My role: Senior UX/UI Designer; mapped the experience, defined key workflows, and translated product and customer requirements into digital journeys and interface concepts.
Partners: Brand managers, marketing teams, UX designers, and cross-functional teams.
Deliverables: Journey maps, workflows, wireframes, and interface concepts.
Outcome: A shared foundation for discussing the experience and translating it into a visual product direction.
The Job
At Life.IO, I contributed to NEXT by Pacific Life by mapping the experience, defining workflows, and developing interface concepts.
One of the projects I contributed to was NEXT by Pacific Life, where I focused on mapping the experience, defining key workflows, and translating complex product and customer requirements into clear digital journeys.
I used journey maps, workflows, wireframes, and interface concepts to make the experience easier to understand before detailed design.
The Overview
Before designing any interface, we needed to understand the journey.
NEXT by Pacific Life was designed to create a more connected digital experience around insurance and financial planning.
The challenge was to understand how the experience connected from initial engagement through later actions and decisions.
Journey mapping became an important part of that work.
By visualizing the experience from beginning to end, I could identify important touchpoints, clarify relationships between workflows, and establish a stronger foundation for the interface design.
The journey came first. The interface followed.
The work focused on creating a clearer relationship between:
People
Who is using the experience and what are they trying to accomplish?
Touchpoints
Where does the interaction begin, continue, and change?
Workflows
What needs to happen at each stage to move the experience forward?
Interface
How should those decisions ultimately appear in the product?
The Needs
Bring the experience into focus.
The project needed a simple way to make a complicated experience easier to understand and design.
Map the journey
Visualize the end-to-end experience and identify the major stages, touchpoints, and interactions.
Define the workflows
Translate the broader journey into practical workflows that could guide the design of individual experiences.
Create consistency
Establish a clear visual and interaction direction across the different parts of the product.
Make complexity visible
Use visual documentation to communicate how the experience worked and where different actions, states, and decisions connected.
The Challenge
A good interface starts with a clear understanding of what happens before it.
The complexity of the project was not necessarily in any one screen.
It was in the relationships between screens, actions, users, and business requirements.
Before refining interfaces, I mapped the larger experience and made those relationships visible to the team.
Journey maps and workflows provided that foundation.
They gave us a shared view of the experience and created a practical bridge between strategy, UX, and visual design.
The Approach
Visualize the experience before designing it.
I mapped the journey, defined workflows, and translated those structures into interface concepts.
01 — Map
I began by mapping the broader experience to understand its major stages, touchpoints, and relationships.
This helped establish a common view of how the experience should unfold.
02 — Define
From the journey map, I developed more detailed workflows that illustrated what users needed to accomplish within each part of the experience.
These flows helped clarify navigation, decision points, actions, and dependencies.
03 — Explore
With the underlying structure established, I translated the workflows into wireframes and interface concepts.
This allowed the team to evaluate how the mapped experience could become a usable digital product.
04 — Refine
I refined the concepts into UI directions that brought together hierarchy, interaction, visual language, and broader experience requirements.
The Ideation
Turning structure into something people could interact with.
Once the journey and workflows were established, I began exploring how those structures could translate into the interface.
Wireframes allowed the experience to be tested at the structural level before visual details became the focus.
Exploring the experience
The work moved from broad journey maps into increasingly detailed flows and screen concepts.
Each iteration helped answer a simple question:
Does the interface make the underlying journey easier to understand and navigate?
The Refinement
From mapped experience to visual experience.
With the core workflows established, I refined the interface direction around hierarchy, clarity, and consistency.
The goal was to make the product feel cohesive while preserving the logic established during the earlier journey-mapping work.
Connecting the pieces
The final designs reflected the structure established through the journey maps and workflows.
This created a closer relationship between the experience strategy and the visual interface—each screen supporting the larger journey rather than existing as an isolated interaction.
The Result
A clearer foundation for designing the NEXT experience.
For NEXT by Pacific Life, I created journey maps, workflows, and interface explorations that gave the broader team a shared basis for discussion and design.
The maps clarified the experience.
The workflows clarified the interactions.
The interface concepts brought those ideas into a tangible product direction.
Together, these artifacts connected experience definition to visual design.
The Conclusion
Design the journey before designing the screen.
The NEXT project reinforced the value of stepping back from individual interfaces and looking at the experience as a whole.
Journey maps and workflows gave the team a shared language for understanding the product, while the interface design translated that structure into something people could actually use.
A clear journey gave the interface work a stronger starting point.