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With 10 years of experience working on digital products, I like going where there's problems to solve.
I use data, research, and AI-assisted development to help design experiences that make strategic impact.
For Industry Leaders
and Market Challengers
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I came into the design world with an understanding that design does a little bit of everything. I also have delusional confidence and curiosity that makes me want to learn a lot of things. Because of that I consider myself a “M-shaped” designer. I go deep on Product Design, Research, and Strategy, but also have experience in Branding, and Graphic Design. This allows me to work cross-functionally at larger organizations, and flex into different roles at smaller ones.
It's better to launch something and learn than to wait and debate and never launch anything because you want it to be perfect.
AI is making building things faster and easier than ever. That means it's even more important to listen to users and understand what they actually need.
Users care more if a product solves their problem than if it looks sexy. UI is the icing on the cake.
And anyone that acts like they do is lying. Product development is a game of tradeoffs and the goal is to learn.
I’m Lena, a Chicago native who’s a Texan at heart. After college I started in product but being a natural creative, it wasn’t long before I moved into UX design. I get energy from solving complex business problems and creating simple, intuitive experiences for users.
In my free time I love hunting, cooking, and traveling (to Japan in particular).
“Lena Stefani is the kind of UX designer every team hopes to have—strategic, insightful, and relentlessly focused on improving the user experience. What sets Lena apart is her ability to translate complex research findings into elegant, intuitive design solutions that truly move the needle.”
Let’s talk. Drop me a message below.
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In 2020, Lennar assembled its Virtual Buying and Selling Teams. The Virtual Selling team was responsible for building and maintaining the Digital Sales Presentation, a platform built to sell homes virtually during the Covid-19 Pandemic. Because the Virtual Buying Online Checkout was seen as more innovative and had more potential for revenue, it was the primary focus of the teams until users became more vocal.
During a down housing market, Lennar corporate advised divisions to cut costs, with one of those costs being external vendors. Lennar divisions operated as their own states, and because the Digital Sales Presentation was not meeting their needs as a sales tool, they sought outside vendors to build them a custom sales presentation. With over 75 divisions, this was over $400,000 in costs per year to build and maintain these platforms. At the same time, because these come out of their individual budgets — nothing is forcing the Divisions to switch. We need to build something they’ll use as though they were an external customer.
Myself and my user researcher flew to Florida to meet with the Florida division who was most vocal about the transition. We observed them selling to homebuyers in a variety of communities — some fully built and almost sold out, others still under construction but with the prospect of outrageous amenities. Because Florida was not able to use the Digital Sales Presentation, some communities used external vendor developed programs to show availability. Others had foam boards with availability and amenities mounted on the wall.
This was the crux of the issue — every community was different, and every division was different — at least, that’s what we were told.
Upon returning we spoke with additional regions who said the same thing — that the way they sell is unique, and that a digital program would need to be customized. But ultimately we found that there were 5 steps that nearly all successful Lennar sales reps took when a prospective homebuyer walked through the door.
The proven sales method
Make a Friend
You’re not selling — you’re getting to know them. Understand their needs and what’s bringing them in.
Start Big, Zero In
Narrow from the big picture down to the personal.
Show the Home
Show Good, Better, and Best — never more than 3 homes. By now, they already know.
Sales reps said that our homes aren’t different from many of our competitors, and focusing on home specs forces the buyer to focus on price. Instead, the sales reps like to focus on the experiential aspects of buying from Lennar.
Based on this feedback we knew the following:
The landing page would be the community video that could act as a screensaver when no one was present. This helps sell the idea of the community. From there, the About Lennar tab is an option for sales reps who want a visual to speak to the size and accomplishments of Lennar.
The nearby tab was created to give sales reps an opportunity to speak to the location. Lennar, being a large homebuilder, has the ability to build in more favorable areas. For those communities that are in more rural or undeveloped areas, sales reps use the map to speak to how Lennar building communities helps areas develop over time. We also built the capability for them to search for distances to specific locations to make sure the tour experience felt personal.
Most importantly, the Community Map showed the full picture of availability for all communities, as well as filtering capabilities to help sales reps quickly filter down to homes that match the buyer’s preferences. From here, they still had the flexibility to do a virtual tour of a home, or drill down into the details to get more specific specs about a certain home.
This experience also included a dynamic Amenities map, a mortgage calculator, a compare feature, and the ability to track a session from start to finish so that a sales rep could then send a recap of their tour to the homebuyer once completed.
The initial rollout was bumpy, but eventually thanks to corporate trainers and regular communication with sales reps, we were able to get adoption across all Divisions. This project laid the groundwork for further development around the sales rep tool ecosystem, allowing sales reps to track leads, tours, and follow ups across all Lennar internal tool touchpoints.
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ShipBob needed to redesign its new business onboarding for its Startup Stella Persona. Stella represented 22% of new revenue in Q2, and 58% of all merchants shipping with ShipBob. Our primary KPI was to increase the Startup Stella’s submitting warehouse receiving orders by 10%, knowing that submission increased likelihood of conversion by 80%.
Startup Stella’s made up a large percentage of ShipBob’s revenue, but the self-service onboarding experience was failing them. The data showed there was an average of 20 days between warehouse receiving order submission and receipt at warehouse, but we knew that 80% of Startup Stellas that create a warehouse receiving order convert to shipping their first order.
I conducted moderated user interviews with real merchants — a first for ShipBob — and combined those findings with support ticket analysis and behavioral data. We knew these users had low business complexity, but little experience with logistics and very little time to spare.
Pricing was confusing, appeared more costly than competitors, and came too late in the flow
The onboarding tasklist included unnecessary steps, industry jargon, and was surrounded by distracting dashboard elements
Merchants who submitted a warehouse receiving order had an 80% conversion rate — but most never got there without help
Increase conversion on new user Sign Up.
Increase number of submitted Warehouse receiving orders.
Decrease number of days to send inventory to ShipBob warehouse.
We first added a qualification step to the flow to aid in the reduction of $10,000 refunds. By asking them what they AREN’T selling, we felt this was an easy way to reduce errors down the road and eventually tailor their experience.
The next step would be integration. This step ultimately was deprioritized due to lack of engineering resources, but when we did unmoderated user testing of these flows, participants said they wanted to understand pricing before they connected.
Lastly, we would show the calculator. We went through several iterations of this page; some with category selectors, others with sliders alluding to custom pricing. This was a major concern as in the scenario a larger merchant went through this flow, they may not know they were eligible for quantity price breaks.
Below is the final price calculator which was a simple box calculator. This option showed all of the different factors that go into pricing at ShipBob; this was important as ShipBob is typically viewed as being more expensive than competitors, when in reality it included many benefits that other competitors upcharged for.
Because we removed so many steps from the dashboard into the onboarding flow, we could use the dashboard to get them where we wanted them to be much faster: adding their products and sending us their inventory. Everything else could be done after the fact, including integrating their store.
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I led the pre- and post-launch design of thinkorswim Web, a new web-based trading platform to pair with the legacy thinkorswim desktop and mobile applications built for active traders, but we wanted it to be friendly enough for those users newer to the active trader space and clients coming from the Schwab acquisition who may be less familiar with the platforms.
Advanced orders — trades that trigger or cancel future trades — accounted for just 1% of all trades, but were placed by the platform's most lucrative traders. These power users had been requesting the feature since launch, and the platform needed it for both compliance and competitive parity. We opted to build this before other requested features given this, as well as the fact that markets were volatile and other features were bottlenecked due to engineering constraints.
I led the design and research for this feature, working alongside a Product Manager and a team of 3 engineers.
I conducted user research with active traders and internal employees to understand how they thought about advanced order types. I wanted to learn if and how users were interacting with this feature on our existing platforms, and what their mindset was around placing these types of trades. Here's what we learned:
Many traders didn't know what advanced orders were or how to place them — the existing interface made them feel like the system was trading for them
Users who did place these trades did so almost exclusively on desktop because the mobile interface was too manual and complex
These users mapped to a “swing trader” persona — capturing price movements over hours to weeks, where speed and strategic order configuration were critical
Swing traders who needed advanced orders to automate their trading strategies used these to capture quick price movements. Movements may take place as quickly as intraday, or sometimes over the course of 1–2 weeks. These types of order builds occur within what we called the “Strategize” step of the journey as the user is gauging the level of risk they're willing to take on before submitting their trade.
Competitors lacked the depth and complexity that thinkorswim had for active traders (First Image) so there wasn't much inspiration to gather. In an effort to understand what I was building more deeply, I had my Product Manager walk me through exactly what happens with each of these trades, and noticed a pattern. It reminded me of conditional logic.
I took inspiration from the conditional logic builder to build this toggle into the trade ticket. My assumption was that it was quick enough for an advanced user to toggle between different order types, but provided clarity to newer users about what the relationships were between the different trades they'd be placing. After sharing the first iteration internally, I received feedback that it wasn't clear what the relationship was between the trades, and that the buy/sell wasn't clear enough given the colors and the ability to remove trades (via the checkbox). That led me to the second iteration on the right, where I removed the checkboxes, added color and text to indicate the buy and sell legs of the trade, and centered the toggle with “connected” to make the toggle more prominent.
“This one is pretty simple to follow. It’s just the logical conditions to put in what happens — what are the conditions based on triggering the next order. So, if I want the subsequent orders to only be considered when the buy order triggers, I would hit “THEN”. And then on the two sell orders, I guess the “AND” option wouldn’t apply, unless I have a different type of order. If the question is do I understand what this does, then yes, it’s pretty self-explanatory.”
The feedback in user interviews was overwhelmingly positive, with users both experienced and novice stating that the toggles we had them use helped them understand the purpose and relationships between the trades.
Once we validated the concept, I continued to make concepts for edge cases like the one seen on the left. While it was an edge case, our platform was primarily built for option traders. This solution was not only flexible enough to accommodate option trades, but also could be integrated with other order types we'd be adding down the line.
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