Orbit

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

Overview

New financial professionals faced a critical bottleneck: over 90% of onboarding applications were marked "not in good order" (NIGO) due to a repetitive, cumbersome system. This wasn't just frustrating for candidates, it created substantial costs through manual rework and delayed time-to-production for new hires.

The existing platform suffered from unclear instructions, redundant data entry, poor navigation, and frequent system glitches that forced users to restart their work.

Understanding the problem

Outcome

Translated complex financial concepts, FINRA U4 and Personal Sales Record, into intuitive user interfaces, contributing to a reported 89% improvement in user understanding and confidence during employment onboarding.

Improved user task completion rate by 82%.

Reduced customer support inquiries by 76%.

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Currently, Financial professionals wanting to apply to sell MassMutual products do so on an outdated system.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

Team

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

Timeline

2 years

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

I conducted two weeks of user interviews by:

  • Searching the company's research repository to identify agencies

  • Speaking with newly onboarding candidates at multiple agencies

  • Visiting the main office to interview home office workers

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

After discovery, I aligned with the team to discuss technical limitations, development timelines, and success metrics. My UX strategy focused on three principles:

Integration

Intuition

Ease

  • Connect data across systems

  • Eliminate duplicate questions

  • Enable editing and changes

  • Provide all users access to candidate profiles

  • Create comprehensive tracking and dashboard

  • Build in user error prevention

  • Add USPS address validation

  • Provide status visibility for all users

  • Trigger automated next steps

  • Include reporting for home office

  • Design for regulatory flexibility

  • Modernize the visual experience

  • Reduce friction points

  • Deliver clear, concise content

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.

Design & Iteration

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.

User Feedback Shaped the Design

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

Quantitative results:

  • 89% improvement in user understanding and confidence

  • 82% task completion rate

  • 76% reduction in customer support inquiries

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

This project taught me to:

Lead through research and strategy - Front-loading discovery helped identify problems and validate ideas before significant development investment

Build cross-functional partnerships - Bringing engineers into early wireframe reviews (not just final handoffs) reduced back-and-forth and strengthened relationships

Contribute to team culture - I created documentation on the VQA process and dev/design partnership that became team standards, and established a "complexity matrix" framework that other designers adopted for evaluating when to simplify vs. educate users

Design for the entire ecosystem - Every workflow was designed consistently, utilizing chunking as a design principle and maintaining continuous commitment to understand and iterate

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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