Lily Mukhutdinova

SaaS Platform Collections — Organizing Content with Ease

Client: SaaS for wealth management professionals

Industry:
Fintech
Duration:
Feb 2024 - Sep 2024
Role:
Lead Product Designer (UX/UI, research, prototyping, design system alignment)
Team:
Design Manager, Product Owner, Engineers, Stakeholders
Overview
Collections is a feature I designed for the SaaS Platform Platform, created to help users structure, save, and manage resources in a flexible way. My role was to lead the UX/UI design, simplifying complex flows and creating reusable UI components that made navigating large volumes of content seamless.
Context & Challenge

When I joined the project, SaaS Platform’s platform offered a simple Bookmarks feature. Wealth Management (WM) users relied on it to save useful articles, guides, and contacts. But this functionality was limited:

  • Bookmarks were personal, making it hard for assistants, advisors, and home office users to work together.
  • Materials needed for client meetings often lived outside the platform — on desktops, in email attachments, or printed binders.
  • Sharing and curating resources required duplicating effort, resulting in inefficiency and missed opportunities to leverage the platform.

We identified a key opportunity: enable users to create organized, shareable collections that could adapt to different workflows — from client preparation to firm-wide educational initiatives.

“I wanted Collections to feel like a natural extension of the platform — intuitive, powerful, and built to scale.”

Understanding the Users
To ground the solution, I led persona workshops with stakeholders and built user journeys that represented everyday challenges. Each persona reflected distinct “jobs to be done” within the wealth management ecosystem.
Through these personas, we uncovered recurring patterns:
  • Advisors and assistants wanted flexible collaboration
  • Home Office users wanted strict control over permissions to maintain compliance and fairness.
  • Specialized teams needed large-scale sharing tools to broadcast content efficiently to hundreds of advisors.
By framing the design process around these lived scenarios, we ensured the Collections feature solved real problems across multiple layers of the organization.
Process
I approached this project with an iterative, research-driven workflow. From the start, I collaborated closely with stakeholders and facilitated workshops to uncover their needs and expectations. These sessions helped me gather insights from both Wealth Management advisors and Home Office users, shaping realistic personas and mapping detailed user journeys.
Once the problem space was clear, I:
  • Benchmarked competitors (Pinterest, Notion, Google Drive, Figma, etc.) to understand best practices in collaborative sharing.
  • Created role-based permission models (Owner, Editor, Viewer) and mapped specific actions for each.
  • Explored multiple flows for creating, sharing, and managing Collections, running lightweight A/B tests to validate which patterns were intuitive.
  • Partnered with PMs and engineers to balance scope and flexibility (e.g., deciding how much control to give Collection owners vs. collaborators).
This iterative approach allowed me to test assumptions early, refine quickly, and align the design with both advisor workflows and organizational needs.
Design Solutions
The final solution introduced a flexible, collaborative Collection system:
  1. Creating and Organizing Collections
    • Users could save content into “My Bookmarks” (always private) or create new Collections for different purposes.
    • Collections could be personal, shared with colleagues, or broadcast to large groups of advisors.
  2. Collaboration & Permissions
    • Added Owner, Editor, Viewer roles with clear permissions.
    • Designed a Share Collection modal with separate Editors and Viewers tabs for easy management.
  3. Team & Large-Scale Sharing
    • Introduced the ability to create Teams and link them to multiple Collections.
    • Added “Broadcast Collection” functionality for scenarios where hundreds or even thousands of advisors needed curated resources.
  4. Link Sharing & Invitations
    • Enabled users to share Collection links, with smart flows for both existing platform users and new invitees.
    • Designed flows for requesting access, pending approvals, and onboarding new colleagues directly into the right Collection.
  5. UI Improvements & Navigation
    • Moved Collections from a hidden bookmark icon to a dedicated top-level tab, increasing discoverability.
    • Added subtle feedback like character limits, role-specific views, and notifications for updates.
By combining collaboration, flexibility, and organizational control, Collections became a powerful tool for both day-to-day advisor prep and large-scale content distribution.
Outcome & Impact
The redesigned Collections feature launched successfully and quickly became one of the most-used areas of the platform:
  • +26% increase in platform activity within the first month post-launch.
  • Advisors and assistants used Collections to streamline meeting preparation, cutting down on duplicate effort and scattered files.
  • Home Office teams leveraged Collections to curate and broadcast strategic content, improving engagement with large advisor groups.
  • Stakeholders praised the balance between open collaboration and controlled sharing.
Ultimately, the feature transformed what was once a basic bookmarking tool into a central hub for collaboration, knowledge sharing, and client prep efficiency.

“Collections turned out to be more than a feature — it became a foundation for how users structured their experience on SaaS Platform.”