Personalized Shortcuts
Favourites | Suncentral | Sun Life Financial
ROLE
Lead UX & Sole Designer.
TIMELINE
4+ Months
USERS
Advisors, Assistants and Back Office Users.
CHALLENGE
Users couldn't easily access their most used tools and pages.
IMPACT
Faster access, higher efficiency, and first fully personalized experience.
TEAM
Product Manager, Engineering Team, UX Designer (me).
First, let me tell you about the personalized shortcuts or"Favourites".
Favourites is a groundbreaking initiative, representing the first fully customizable experience ever implemented at Sun Life. It lets users customize and access their most-used actions directly from the dashboard, providing a simple and intuitive way to save and organize relevant content while establishing a scalable pattern for multiple Sun Life platforms.
Overview
I led the zero-to-one design of the "Favourites" ecosystem, transforming Suncentral into a truly personalized productivity tool. In high-pressure financial environments, speed is a competitive advantage; however, advisors and staff were losing time navigating a vast architecture of tools.
This project marked a major milestone as the first time Sun Life transitioned from a static interface to a fully customizable environment. Beyond simply allowing users to "bookmark" items, I architected this zero-to-one system to empower users to curate their own digital workspace through custom folders and integrated shortcuts, significantly reducing cognitive load.
Why are we doing this?
Suncentral's standard architecture forced users to "re-find" the same items every day through repetitive and fragmented paths. We initiated this project to:
Introduce Personalization
Transition Sun Life from a static, standardized interface to its first truly customizable mental model centered on user-curated productivity.
Bridge the Efficiency Gap
Eliminate the "death by a thousand clicks" caused by drilling through multiple levels of navigation for the same 5-10 daily resources.
Enable Content Prioritization
Improve how users interact with content-heavy environments by allowing them to manage important items actively.
BEFORE
Re-Finding Content
Repeated navigation
Same resources searched every day
Multiple level of clicks
Static experience
No personalization
AFTER
Personalized Productivity
Personalized dashboard
Custom folders
One-click access
User-curated workspace
Faster daily workflows
Key challenges
Legacy Mental Models
Introducing a personalized experience to users who were accustomed to a static, standardized interface.
Scalability Requirements
Designing a flexible system that could be adapted and implemented across multiple portals within Sun Life Financial.
Design System Limitations
Innovating new patterns, such as advanced collapsible folders, that did not yet exist in the Sun Life design system.
Cross-Platform Consistency
Creating a unified interaction model that maintains a consistent experience across different products.
Our goals
Empower Curation: Enable users to build custom workspaces with folders and integrated shortcuts.
Simplify Navigation: Reduce cognitive load by providing a direct path to frequently used resources.
Innovate Patterns: Build scalable UI components that solve immediate needs while meeting brand standards.
Optimise Speed: Save time during client meetings and daily tasks through a personalized navigation menu.
Taking a deep dive
To validate our direction, I conducted user research to understand expectations around shortcuts and how users approach repetitive tasks. I gathered insights into discovery, contextual application, and the level of flexibility users required.
I ran A/B tests early in the process to compare different approaches and inform the direction based on actual user behaviour and preference. This combined research and testing phase helped define the foundational requirements for the system from the start.
The Strategy: Behavioral UX
I synthesized findings into key themes around usability, discoverability, and efficiency expectations.
By mapping user journeys from intent to action, I defined how users would interact with a completely new shortcut system to ensure the experience was intuitive from first use.
Design Process
To solve the limitations of our static design library, I worked in close collaboration with the UI developer to build dynamic components from scratch. By leveraging React, we were able to implement the specific component behaviours required for a truly interactive personalization experience, such as the advanced collapsible folders.
I maintained continuous feedback loops with both product and engineering teams to ensure technical feasibility throughout development. This partnership allowed us to iterate on structure and interaction patterns based on real-world feedback, refining the clarity and consistency of the system as it evolved.
Roadblocks & Challenges
This project involved introducing a completely new mental model for productivity within a rigid, legacy environment. I had to lead the design of an entirely new ecosystem while navigating technical constraints and existing architectural vastness.
Pattern Innovation
Building functional organization systems like collapsible folders while remaining strictly compliant with brand standards.
Navigational Complexity
Solving for a fragmented architecture where speed is a competitive advantage but retrieval paths were repetitive.
Contextual Adaptability
Ensuring the experience worked cohesively as a newly defined system while thinking beyond a single use case.
Let’s design
The final Favourites experience provides a unified interaction model that allows users to prioritize content consistently across different products. Key design implementations included:
-
Global Star Icon: A persistent star icon at the top of pages allows users to initiate the Favourites workflow from anywhere on the site, supporting various content types like PDFs and tools.
-
Integrated Workflow Modals: Users can create new folders with personalized names, add items to existing ones, or perform both actions simultaneously within a single, streamlined modal.
-
Dedicated Favourites Dashboard: A specialized, centralized hub that provides the flexibility to pin most-used items, making them easier and quicker to find.
-
Advanced Folder Management: Expanded folders allow users to view respective added items and perform personalization actions, such as renaming or moving items, directly within the dashboard view.
-
Real-Time Feedback: A clear success message is displayed as soon as an item is added, confirming its location on the Favourites dashboard.
System-level thinking enables features to scale without losing clarity, proving that designing reusable patterns increases long-term product value.
Click images to enlarge and view additional details.
The Impact & Key Takeaways
This work extends beyond a single feature by introducing a reusable personalization model that contributes to a more cohesive ecosystem. What I’m most proud of is how this work:
Empowers User Prioritization
Successfully introduced Sun Life's first fully customizable capability, improving how users interact with content-heavy environments.
Modernized Technical Standards
Successfully bridged gaps in the design library by building custom React components that support dynamic, real-time personalization.
Optimises Workflow Speed
Minimized reliance on repeated navigation or search, providing a direct path to frequently used content.
Drives Internal Adoption
Established such a foundational personalization pattern that other Sun Life teams showed interest in implementing this exact same solution for their platforms.