Orbit

Transforming Financial Professional Onboarding: From 90% Failure to 82% Success

Overview

Business Context
The organization faced high operational costs and onboarding delays due to manual verification, inconsistent data capture, and frequent support escalations.

User Context
Primary users were newly contracted financial professionals navigating compliance-heavy forms for the first time.
Secondary users included recruiters, internal operations, and compliance teams.

Core UX Problems

  • Poor content hierarchy made critical steps hard to discover

  • Redundant data entry increased abandonment

  • System feedback was unclear, creating uncertainty and mistrust

Understanding the problem

  • 82% completion rate (up from 10%)

  • 40 hours → 12 hours

  • 4.7/5 satisfaction

User outcomes:

Outcome

Business outcomes:

  • $3.2M annual savings

  • 6-week faster time

  • 40% reduction in support tickets

Background

Currently, Financial professionals wanting to apply to sell MassMutual products do so on an outdated system. This system has two other touch points that being the agency, they are applying to work with, as well as MassMutual’s home office.

Info

Role

Lead UX Designer -owned research, experience strategy, interaction design, and cross-functional alignment.

Team

I collaborated with a product owner, scrum master, business analyst, 4 engineers, and a part-time visual designer.

Timeline

26 months

Discovery: Understanding Three Interconnected Users

Rather than jumping to solutions, I invested deeply in understanding the problem space. I discovered this wasn't a single-user problem—it involved three distinct groups:

  • Financial professionals (brokers, career agents) selling insurance products with 1:1 customer relationships

  • Agencies that distribute insurance products and manage the professionals

  • Home office workers who support professionals throughout their careers

Research approach

Methods Used

  • Contextual walkthrough of the live onboarding system

  • Qualitative interviews with new advisors and internal processing teams

  • Heuristic evaluation of legacy flows

What I learned

Candidates struggled with:

  • Content areas too small to read comfortably

  • Hidden or hard-to-find buttons

  • Unclear instructions throughout

  • Answering identical questions multiple times

Agencies experienced:

  • Near-universal NIGO applications due to user error

  • Excessive back-and-forth between candidates and home office

  • Such frustration that they reverted to paper applications

Home office workers dealt with:

  • Juggling multiple platforms for each candidate

  • No status tracking capability

  • Daily system glitches

  • Poor or nonexistent search functionality

  • Everything requiring manual processing

Going Deeper: Walking in Their Shoes

To truly understand the technical issues, I personally completed the entire recruiting and onboarding process from each user's perspective: candidate, agency, and home office.

I discovered critical UX failures in application tracking, manual intake forms (like FINRA's U4 and Personal Sales Records), and a system so unreliable that home office staff relied on email notifications for errors, background check failures, and sensitive data requests.

A telling example: The Personal Sales Record form had unclear instructions scattered across the page and required candidates to manually calculate totals,a recipe for errors.

Strategy: Connecting User Needs with Business Goals

Experience Principles

  • Integration: unify fragmented steps into a coherent flow

  • Intuition: reduce cognitive load through progressive disclosure

  • Clarity: make system state and next steps always visible

Key Design Decisions

  • Introduced step-by-step flow for complex sections

  • Implemented real time validation and inline error handling

  • Standardized layout using design system patterns for scalability

Visual Design Approach

I created a consistent template across all three user types to reduce cognitive load, used progressive disclosure and "chunking" to manage complex regulatory information, established clear typographic hierarchy meeting WCAG 2.2 standards, and modernized the experience while respecting the enterprise design system.

Research Insights that shaped the solution

Starting with paper sketches, I focused on creating a template that looked and felt consistent whether viewed by candidates, agencies, or home office staff. I collaborated with our UX researcher to conduct usability testing over 3 days with 10 participants per user type.

Candidates appreciated:

  • Much easier to read content area

  • Visible action buttons

  • Knowing which documents to prepare before starting

Agencies liked:

  • The improved layout

  • Clickable navigation

  • Request for timeout warnings when navigating away

Home office workers valued:

  • The dashboard functionality

  • Search capabilities

  • Acknowledged they'd need time to learn the new system

I iterated based on this feedback until reaching a solution that earned confidence from all three user groups.

Handoff & Quality Assurance

My engineering handoff wasn't just about delivering files, it was about ensuring shared understanding. I did the following:

  • Reviewed user research and problem statements

  • Demonstrated the full user journey with interactive prototypes

  • Walked through all user flows, interactions, and hover effects

  • Addressed edge cases: empty states, loading states, timeouts, errors

  • Participated in QA to verify design system implementation and accessibility

The Result: A White-Glove Experience

The final design streamlined the experience for all users with:

  • Concise communication and UX copy

  • Minimized clicks and eliminated repetitive data entry

  • Clear progress indicators showing what's left and who to contact

  • Seamless handoffs between user types

  • Scalable architecture for future growth

Impact That Mattered

Business Impact

  • 82% improvement in task completion (measured over X weeks post-launch)

  • 76% reduction in support tickets (compared to previous quarter baseline)

User Impact

  • Users reported higher confidence when submitting documentation

  • Decreased time spent per onboarding session

Internal Impact

  • Reduced rework by operations teams

  • Faster approval cycles

Qualitative feedback that captured why this work matters

"It was difficult to find your way around the previous product. Orbit looks and feels fluid and intuitive for our employees.”

"It looks much better, easy to follow, and read, clean looking."

"I can tell the design decisions made and strategy triangulated with research."

That last quote captures why I do this work, reducing friction isn't just about efficiency, it's about human experience.

Day 2 Considerations

Post-launch monitoring revealed the 82% success rate, but I conducted follow-up research to understand why it worked. Future opportunities include:

  • Updating UI to match the evolved design system

  • Improving candidate dashboard information display

  • Enhancing the U4 section progress indicator

What I Learned

  • Designing for compliance-heavy experiences requires deep alignment with legal and operations early.

  • Progressive disclosure dramatically reduced cognitive overload but required close technical collaboration.

What I’d Do Differently

  • Run earlier prototype testing with internal users to validate edge cases sooner

  • Invest more heavily in microcopy testing upfront

Note: Specific company details and visual designs are protected by NDA. This case study focuses on process, decisions, and learnings that demonstrate my approach to complex enterprise challenges.

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