SAG-AFTRA

Where is my money?

Client
SAG-AFTRA
Discipline
Member experience
Role
Design Director
Year
2025
Research
30 member interviews
Responsibilities
Research, UX, information hierarchy, UI design
The residuals tracking experience

Overview

Residuals are how actors get paid. Understanding where a payment sat in the process was needlessly opaque, so we made the union’s internal workflow visible to its members.

Research

Start with the people actually waiting for the money.

Structured interviews with thirty SAG-AFTRA members, not to test whether they could click through, but to learn how they think about residuals.

Six mobile screens from the SAG-AFTRA member app, each paired with a member
The members this is for, and the screens they actually use.

Designing for transparency

Show the process, not just the result.

Members were seeing Paid or Not paid. The journey in between was invisible, and that gap is where the anxiety lived.

The Residual Tracker Journey: ten stages mapped across user task, primary actions, key questions, touchpoints, emotional state, pain points and product opportunities

Hierarchy

Not every piece of information is equally important.

Rebuilt around the five questions a member actually arrives with: how much, what for, where is it, do I need to act, what happens next.

Three states of the residuals tracker showing time frame, payment range and sort-by-company controls
Filtering by date, amount and company, finding one payment among hundreds.
The redesigned residuals interface
Getting started with the residuals portal

Outcome

30 Members interviewed
5 Questions the hierarchy is built around
1 Status vocabulary across the product

We weren’t simply reducing clicks. We were reducing uncertainty.

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