Most parents struggle to understand RESPs, leaving grants, savings, and opportunities unused. Embark brings every essential step of RESP planning into one clear, accessible place—helping parents save smarter with confidence.
Company
Embark Student Corp
Timeline
2023
—
2025
Role
Product Designer & Creative Developer
Project overview
I redesigned Embark’s secure site to make RESP planning simple, transparent, and action-oriented for parents. My work focused on improving clarity, reducing friction, and supporting high-stakes financial decisions.
What I worked on
Auto-Generated Grant Applications
Streamlined onboarding by automatically generating all required RESP grant forms.
Result: Faster setup, fewer errors, and reduced support tickets.
Savings Calculator
Built a clear, interactive tool that shows parents how their contributions grow over time.
Result: Improved financial understanding and more confident planning.
Transfer-In Flow
Redesigned the experience for moving existing RESPs from other institutions.
Result: Clear guidance, smoother document submission, and higher completion rates.
RESP Gifting Feature
Created a unique feature that lets parents share a secure link so family/friends can contribute directly to their child’s RESP.
Result: A standout offering not available at traditional banks; increased engagement and contributions.
New Savings-Focused Dashboard
Shifted the dashboard from an education-heavy layout to a financially driven overview.
Result: Parents can see balances, growth, grants, and next steps instantly—no confusion, no searching.
Message Centre Enhancements
Redesigned the secure site’s Message Centre to support not only user inquiries but also document uploads required for RESP processing.
Result: Faster issue resolution, fewer back-and-forth emails, and a smoother end-to-end RESP workflow for parents.
Challenges
Embark’s secure site supported a high-stakes financial product, but parents struggled with:
Low financial literacy and unfamiliar RESP terminology.
Lacking direction, resulting in hesitation or inaction.
A playful, kid-themed UI that didn’t match the seriousness of managing thousands of dollars.
Manual, confusing flows for grants and transfers that caused parent frustration and support calls.
Lack of forecasting tools, making it hard for parents to understand what their savings would amount to over time.
Manual paperwork for grants and transfers created friction and required parents to send documents through email or external channels.
Opportunity
Through user interviews with parents from diverse financial backgrounds, we identified opportunities to:
Simplify every task with language, flows, and interfaces that guide parents step-by-step.
Build trust through a clean, modern, financial-grade UI.
Automate and streamline critical actions (grants, transfers, contributions) to reduce errors and stress.
Enable long-term planning through calculators, school cost tools, and career discovery for kids.
Create a differentiated product, including a unique RESP gifting feature not offered by traditional banks.
Introduce a flexible Message Centre that supports file uploads for all RESP tasks:
missing documents
grant forms
verification files
withdrawal requests for post-secondary education
This creates a central hub for communication and paperwork, increasing efficiency and trust.
Challenges
I redesigned Embark’s secure site to make RESP planning simple, transparent, and action-oriented for parents. My work focused on improving clarity, reducing friction, and supporting high-stakes financial decisions.
Design process
Research & Understanding the Problem
To understand how parents interact with their RESPs, we conducted interviews with families across a wide range of financial literacy, income levels, and number of children.
Our research focused on:
How confident parents felt managing RESPs
Their understanding of grants, contributions, and transfers
Where they struggled in the existing secure site
How they preferred to receive guidance during financial tasks
What information they needed but weren’t getting
From research, several consistent challenges emerged
Financial Confusion:
Parents found RESP terminology overwhelming.
They didn’t understand grants, transfers, or long-term projections.
Unclear Next Steps
The secure site didn’t guide parents, causing hesitation and abandoned tasks.
Inefficient Paperwork + Support Needs
Grant and transfer processes required multiple documents submitted through email or external channels.
Errors and missing files were common, creating back-and-forth with support.
Lack of Planning Tools
Parents couldn’t estimate future costs or understand how small changes affect long-term savings.
Impact
Redesigning the Embark Secure Site taught me the importance of clarity when dealing with complex, high-stakes topics like education savings. I learned how much language, tone, and visual structure can influence trust—and how simplifying information doesn’t mean oversimplifying the experience.
This project strengthened my ability to collaborate across compliance, product, content, and engineering while balancing user needs with strict financial requirements. If I were to continue iterating, I’d focus on deeper personalization, more guidance for first-time parents, and expanding the planning tools to support families beyond RESP decisions.
Results
Redesigning the Embark Secure Site taught me the importance of clarity when dealing with complex, high-stakes topics like education savings. I learned how much language, tone, and visual structure can influence trust—and how simplifying information doesn’t mean oversimplifying the experience.
This project strengthened my ability to collaborate across compliance, product, content, and engineering while balancing user needs with strict financial requirements. If I were to continue iterating, I’d focus on deeper personalization, more guidance for first-time parents, and expanding the planning tools to support families beyond RESP decisions.
Most parents struggle to understand RESPs, leaving grants, savings, and opportunities unused. Embark brings every essential step of RESP planning into one clear, accessible place—helping parents save smarter with confidence.
Company
Embark Student Corp
Timeline
2023
—
2025
Role
Product Designer & Creative Developer
Project overview
I redesigned Embark’s secure site to make RESP planning simple, transparent, and action-oriented for parents. My work focused on improving clarity, reducing friction, and supporting high-stakes financial decisions.
What I worked on
Auto-Generated Grant Applications
Streamlined onboarding by automatically generating all required RESP grant forms.
Result: Faster setup, fewer errors, and reduced support tickets.
Savings Calculator
Built a clear, interactive tool that shows parents how their contributions grow over time.
Result: Improved financial understanding and more confident planning.
Transfer-In Flow
Redesigned the experience for moving existing RESPs from other institutions.
Result: Clear guidance, smoother document submission, and higher completion rates.
RESP Gifting Feature
Created a unique feature that lets parents share a secure link so family/friends can contribute directly to their child’s RESP.
Result: A standout offering not available at traditional banks; increased engagement and contributions.
New Savings-Focused Dashboard
Shifted the dashboard from an education-heavy layout to a financially driven overview.
Result: Parents can see balances, growth, grants, and next steps instantly—no confusion, no searching.
Message Centre Enhancements
Redesigned the secure site’s Message Centre to support not only user inquiries but also document uploads required for RESP processing.
Result: Faster issue resolution, fewer back-and-forth emails, and a smoother end-to-end RESP workflow for parents.
Challenges
Embark’s secure site supported a high-stakes financial product, but parents struggled with:
Low financial literacy and unfamiliar RESP terminology.
Lacking direction, resulting in hesitation or inaction.
A playful, kid-themed UI that didn’t match the seriousness of managing thousands of dollars.
Manual, confusing flows for grants and transfers that caused parent frustration and support calls.
Lack of forecasting tools, making it hard for parents to understand what their savings would amount to over time.
Manual paperwork for grants and transfers created friction and required parents to send documents through email or external channels.
Opportunity
Through user interviews with parents from diverse financial backgrounds, we identified opportunities to:
Simplify every task with language, flows, and interfaces that guide parents step-by-step.
Build trust through a clean, modern, financial-grade UI.
Automate and streamline critical actions (grants, transfers, contributions) to reduce errors and stress.
Enable long-term planning through calculators, school cost tools, and career discovery for kids.
Create a differentiated product, including a unique RESP gifting feature not offered by traditional banks.
Introduce a flexible Message Centre that supports file uploads for all RESP tasks:
missing documents
grant forms
verification files
withdrawal requests for post-secondary education
This creates a central hub for communication and paperwork, increasing efficiency and trust.
Challenges
I redesigned Embark’s secure site to make RESP planning simple, transparent, and action-oriented for parents. My work focused on improving clarity, reducing friction, and supporting high-stakes financial decisions.
Design process
Research & Understanding the Problem
To understand how parents interact with their RESPs, we conducted interviews with families across a wide range of financial literacy, income levels, and number of children.
Our research focused on:
How confident parents felt managing RESPs
Their understanding of grants, contributions, and transfers
Where they struggled in the existing secure site
How they preferred to receive guidance during financial tasks
What information they needed but weren’t getting
From research, several consistent challenges emerged
Financial Confusion:
Parents found RESP terminology overwhelming.
They didn’t understand grants, transfers, or long-term projections.
Unclear Next Steps
The secure site didn’t guide parents, causing hesitation and abandoned tasks.
Inefficient Paperwork + Support Needs
Grant and transfer processes required multiple documents submitted through email or external channels.
Errors and missing files were common, creating back-and-forth with support.
Lack of Planning Tools
Parents couldn’t estimate future costs or understand how small changes affect long-term savings.
Impact
Redesigning the Embark Secure Site taught me the importance of clarity when dealing with complex, high-stakes topics like education savings. I learned how much language, tone, and visual structure can influence trust—and how simplifying information doesn’t mean oversimplifying the experience.
This project strengthened my ability to collaborate across compliance, product, content, and engineering while balancing user needs with strict financial requirements. If I were to continue iterating, I’d focus on deeper personalization, more guidance for first-time parents, and expanding the planning tools to support families beyond RESP decisions.
Results
Redesigning the Embark Secure Site taught me the importance of clarity when dealing with complex, high-stakes topics like education savings. I learned how much language, tone, and visual structure can influence trust—and how simplifying information doesn’t mean oversimplifying the experience.
This project strengthened my ability to collaborate across compliance, product, content, and engineering while balancing user needs with strict financial requirements. If I were to continue iterating, I’d focus on deeper personalization, more guidance for first-time parents, and expanding the planning tools to support families beyond RESP decisions.