Global Settings

Global Settings Redesign: Laying the Foundation for Self-Serve Onboarding

Company: Aspire | Role: Sole designer, self-initiated | Timeline: Feb 2026, alongside the platform's migration to Shadcn

Impact summary

Independently redesigned Aspire's global settings experience end-to-end, spanning five core areas, account preferences, payment methods, team permissions, integrations, and budget management, unifying a fragmented, outdated experience into one cohesive system as the foundation for a future self-serve onboarding workflow.

The problem

Global settings had grown outdated and disjointed: visually inconsistent, difficult to navigate, and built from a patchwork of different patterns across its five functional areas rather than one coherent experience. When Aspire began migrating its design system to Shadcn, I saw an opportunity to go beyond a visual refresh and take on the information architecture itself.

My role & the constraint that made it hard

I identified and drove this as a self-initiated project alongside the broader Shadcn migration, working as sole designer with no dedicated PM. The real challenge was consistency across genuinely different content: account preferences, payments, team permissions, integrations, and budget management each have different needs, but needed to feel like one centralized experience rather than five disconnected pages.

Process

Discovery: Reviewing the existing settings surfaces made clear the problem wasn't just visual, the five areas had never been designed as a system, so every part felt like its own separate tool bolted onto the platform.

Key decision: I designed toward a single, centralized settings experience with consistent patterns across all five areas, rather than treating each as its own isolated page. This wasn't just a cleanup goal: I positioned it as a deliberate stepping stone toward a future self-serve new-user workflow, where a simplified, unified settings foundation could eventually let new users set up their own accounts without relying on an account manager.

The solution

The redesign unified account preferences, payment methods, team permissions, integrations, and budget management into one consistent settings experience, with shared navigation and interaction patterns built on Aspire's new Shadcn design system, replacing what had been five disconnected pages with their own inconsistent conventions.

Outcome

• Unified five previously fragmented settings areas into one consistent, modern experience.

• Positioned the platform for a future self-serve onboarding workflow, though that follow-on work didn't happen before my tenure ended.