The membership team wanted to revise an existing, outdated application form — including adding the ability to sign up for newsletters directly within the application. My scope was the application form itself: eligibility, tier selection, and the new newsletter step, not the surrounding membership system.
APA offers several membership tiers and which tiers an applicant could even see depended on information entered earlier in the form. Someone with a qualifying degree would see Member as an option; someone one step below that threshold might only see Associate. Designing this meant working through, at each step, the full set of information already entered and what that implied about which options should logically be available next — closer to designing a rules engine than a standard form.
The new newsletter sign-up step had its own layer of the same problem: some newsletter options were themselves tied to eligibility, and a few carried a small additional cost, functioning as a modest upsell within the application flow itself.
This shipped as a Figma deliverable rather than a coded prototype — a deliberate choice based on how this particular engineering team works. Unlike teams that prefer working from existing HTML/CSS they can adapt directly, this team builds in its own platform where a coded prototype wouldn’t transfer, so detailed Figma designs were the more useful handoff.
The membership team responded very positively to the final designs, and there have been no complaints or requested adjustments since.