SAM Technology
Cloud-Based tax & financial intelligence platform
An integrated tax and financial intelligence platform connecting firms and their clients through tax workflows, financial data, wealth management, and real-time insights.
SAM Technology
Cloud-Based tax & financial intelligence platform
An integrated tax and financial intelligence platform connecting firms and their clients through tax workflows, financial data, wealth management, and real-time insights.
The Product
SAM evolved beyond traditional tax preparation software into an integrated platform for tax workflows and financial intelligence. It connects firms and their clients through a unified ecosystem that brings together tax data, financial information, wealth planning, and portfolio insights.
The platform provides dedicated experiences for firms and clients, supporting different needs within a connected financial environment. Firms can manage complex client information and financial workflows, while clients can access a clearer view of their financial position, explore their household balance sheets, and organize important financial documents. By bringing these capabilities together, SAM aims to make complex financial information easier to navigate and more useful for decision-making.
The Firm Client Workflow
Connecting clients with firms through tax services.
Streamlining the tax return process from start to finish.
Simplifying the process between clients and firms.
The Challenge
Designing for a product that kept expanding
As SAM expanded beyond traditional tax preparation into a broader financial intelligence platform, the product needed to support increasingly complex data, workflows, and user needs. Rapid growth brought new capabilities and requirements at a fast pace, while the legacy design introduced limitations that made it difficult to maintain consistency and accommodate an evolving product. Designing for both firms managing detailed client financial information and clients seeking a clearer understanding of their financial position required balancing complexity with clarity, consistency, and ease of use.
The challenge was to evolve the existing experience while working within its technical and structural constraints. The design needed to support expanding capabilities, simplify complex financial workflows, and establish more scalable patterns without disrupting the product’s ongoing development. At the same time, it had to remain flexible enough to accommodate new requirements while delivering a coherent experience across SAM’s connected product areas.
The Challenge
Designing for a product that kept expanding
SAM began as a tax application designed to connect firms and their clients throughout the tax return process. The experience brought together client actions and firm workflows—from creating and managing tax work to document collection, preparation, review, and final delivery.
As the product evolved, that foundation expanded beyond the original Firm–Client workflow. New experiences were introduced for preparers, mobile users, vendors, and strategic partners, while the platform grew to support increasingly complex financial information and workflows.
This evolution ultimately expanded SAM from a tax-focused application into a broader ecosystem connecting tax, financial intelligence, wealth, business, and advisory experiences, including SAM Capital Intelligence.
Three challenges shaped the work
Transforming dense tax, financial, and business information into clear, intuitive experiences that help users navigate complex data and workflows.
Evolving a legacy design with structural limitations while establishing reusable, consistent patterns to support new features, workflows, and responsive experiences.
Designing and refining new experiences amid rapid product growth and fast weekly development cycles, while maintaining usability and design consistency.
Building the foundation
How do you continuously expand a complex product while keeping the experience clear, consistent, and scalable?
To support that growth, I established a reusable visual foundation across components, typography, color, cards, and responsive patterns – allowing new experiences to evolve without redesigning the system from scratch.
UI Figma Components
The Experience
Designing SAM meant connecting the product’s visual foundation with the increasingly complex needs of its users. My work spanned the design system, responsive interfaces, and financial tools, ensuring that new capabilities could integrate into a consistent experience as the platform grew. This required balancing existing design constraints with evolving product requirements and a fast-paced development cycle.
A key part of this work involved establishing a scalable color architecture in Figma to support the transition from Light to Dark Mode, adapting complex financial interfaces for responsive mobile web, and designing experiences that turn financial data into actionable insights. These efforts required balancing visual consistency, information hierarchy, and usability across different screens, themes, and workflows.
Across features such as the AI-powered Digital Vault, My Net Worth, and Entity Mapping, I worked on connecting document intelligence, financial analysis, and complex business relationships into a cohesive product experience. Alongside feature design, I organized design deliverables into modular tasks and coordinated work through Jira to support weekly development sprints. Together, these practices helped maintain design consistency, streamline handoffs, and support the product’s rapid growth.
From Light to Dark
Visual transformation
One key business requirement was to make switching between Light and Dark Mode quick, clean, and consistent. To achieve this, I built reusable design components in Figma and assigned hex color values through a structured system of color variables and tokens. This allowed themes to change systematically instead of requiring manual updates to individual screens.
By connecting component colors to theme values, multiple screens and interface elements could update simultaneously. This created a more maintainable design foundation, simplified global visual updates, and supported consistency as new components and features were introduced.
Mobile Experience
Responsive design
Adapting SAM for mobile web required more than scaling desktop layouts. Financial dashboards, detailed tables, navigation, and data-heavy workflows had to remain usable within a limited viewport.
I adapted layouts and component behavior to prioritize essential information, improve hierarchy, and preserve access to key actions. The goal was to maintain a consistent product experience across desktop and mobile while respecting the constraints of each screen size.
Mobile Experience
Responsive design
Adapting SAM for mobile web required more than scaling desktop layouts. Financial dashboards, detailed tables, navigation, and data-heavy workflows had to remain usable within a limited viewport.
I adapted layouts and component behavior to prioritize essential information, improve hierarchy, and preserve access to key actions. The goal was to maintain a consistent product experience across desktop and mobile while respecting the constraints of each screen size.
Digital Vault
Document management
The Digital Vault combined document management with AI-powered financial analysis. Users could upload financial documents for AI scanning and analysis to identify relevant information and potential opportunities. The challenge was to make this process clear and useful without exposing users to unnecessary technical complexity.
My work focused on organizing the document submission experience, distinguishing original files from extracted information, and presenting the resulting insights clearly. This connected document organization with a more accessible way to review and use AI-generated information.
My Net Worth
Financial overview
My Net Worth brought a client’s financial position into a single, structured view. The experience combined assets, liabilities, liquidity, and cash flow to help users understand their overall financial picture.
My work focused on organizing these data categories into a clear interface with a visual hierarchy that made information easier to scan and interpret. The design also connected with other areas of SAM, including the relationships between individuals, businesses, and their associated assets.
My Net Worth
Financial overview
My Net Worth brought a client’s financial position into a single, structured view. The experience combined assets, liabilities, liquidity, and cash flow to help users understand their overall financial picture.
My work focused on organizing these data categories into a clear interface with a visual hierarchy that made information easier to scan and interpret. The design also connected with other areas of SAM, including the relationships between individuals, businesses, and their associated assets.
Entity Mapping
Complex relationships
Entity Mapping addressed the complexity of relationships between clients, businesses, and financial entities. A single client could have ownership interests across multiple companies, assets, and locations in the United States and internationally.
My work focused on representing these connections through an interface that made relationships between people, businesses, and assets easier to explore. The design organized extensive financial networks into a navigable structure, complementing My Net Worth with broader context around asset ownership.
Firm Dashboard
Operational experience
The Firm Dashboard brought information from SAM’s broader financial experience into the professional interface used by firms. The challenge was to present relevant client and financial information in a way that supported efficient navigation without overwhelming users.
My work focused on information hierarchy, interface organization, and visual consistency. As capabilities such as financial analysis, document intelligence, and entity relationships expanded, the dashboard needed to provide a coherent entry point while maintaining consistent design patterns across the platform.
Firm Dashboard
Operational experience
Providing firms with a centralized workspace to manage clients, monitor tax return statuses, and coordinate daily workflows.
The Outcome
A Scalable Foundation for Growth
SAM’s evolution was about more than modernizing an interface. It meant rethinking how people interact with increasingly complex tax, financial, and business information as the product expanded into a broader financial intelligence ecosystem.
As Lead UI/UX Designer, I helped shape this evolution across Client and Firm experiences, translating dense information into clearer interfaces, adapting core experiences for mobile, and establishing reusable components and visual patterns to support continued product growth.
From the transition to Dark Mode and the development of a more consistent UI foundation to data-rich experiences such as Entity Mapping, Net Worth, and Global Wealth Map, the work focused on making complex information easier to understand, navigate, and act on.
The result was a more connected design experience – one built to bridge tax workflows with a broader view of wealth, assets, business interests, and financial opportunities.