Trang Tran | Human Interest

Business Problem

An overly difficult onboarding process put the company on the brink of losing huge margins.

After getting customer complaints about the Human Interest onboarding, a top SMB payroll provider responsible for referring these customers asked us to get to the bottom of the issues. If we didn't, we'd lose our partnership and in turn, the big chunk of revenue we get from these referrals.

The onboarding UI at the time, which saw little change since the company's humble beginnings.

What's wrong with the current onboarding flow?

Industry jargon was hurled at admins without diving into what they mean

Admins don't know where they are in the flow and how much they need to do

Everyone is forced to speak to an onboarding specialist in to get their plan launched, even if the admin successfully set up their plan on their own

We needed to offer a better self-serve experience within six months, or be removed from our partner's list of preferred 401(k) providers.

This became the company's highest priority for the year, touching domains across growth, sales, integrations, product, and legal. My role involved (1) helping the team understand admin behaviors with secondary research and interviewing onboarding specialists, (2) carrying designs from concept to detailed, (3) scaling the design system, and (4) a bit of quality assurance.

Strategy

To meet the deadline, we focused on making self-serve happen only for the most common plan types.

Must be a "startup" plan—a plan offered for the first time to the company's participants

Must be a single employer—the company can't have any parent or children companies

Must be a referral from our partner payroll provider

Concepting

I led a 2-hr whiteboarding session with the Chief Experience Officer and Product and landed on a "just click next" concept that offers curated plans without the choice paralysis.

These are all the things that an admin needs to determine or do when designing their 401(k):

Default contributions

Auto-enrollment

Employer match

Eligibility

Connect bank

Sign plan docs

Almost everything about a 401(k) plan can be customized, but research suggests that companies lean toward a few popular configurations. Our proposal is to ask admins to make explicit decisions on a few things, while deferring nonessential tasks to a later time. All the admin has to do is confirm some of the defaulted selections.

Sketches showing the pathways of admin decisions.

Screen prospects to route them to the right destinations.

To determine if a prospect qualifies for Fast Track 401(k), we introduced a few questions. Plans deemed too complex would be redirected to an onboarding specialist.

Social proof and in-app education help admins feel more confident in their decisions.

Admins are interested in plans that are common amongst their industry peers. We were careful to show just the right amount of information at the right time.

The Enhanced Match is defaulted because it's one of the most common configurations in the industry.

The new concept radically simplified the setup flow. We only ask admins a few things about their plan, thanks to integrations with our payroll partner that already pull in admin data.

Usability Testing

These ideas were tested with six admin recruits to see if they can complete all steps, including mock signing their plan docs—the final action needed to launch their 401(k).

Were the terms and concepts easy to understand?

Where might admins get stuck in the flow?

Would admins feel good about signing their plan docs?

Synthesized insights from our tests.

While users thought that the flow was simple, there were a few threats to our start-to-complete rate.

Safe Harbor was a mystery. Some thought it was a company, others thought it was a Human Interest-coined feature. Participants said they'd Google it, opening a chance for dropoff.

Language in our flow suggested that there were different tiers of service, but users had trouble finding them. Admins felt that the premium package was forced on them.

mid-research update #1

Designs were reworked to stop headlining with Safe Harbor and in response, people were much more forgiving when it was subtly introduced in body text.

mid-research update #2

The trustee and the authorized signer are sometimes not the same people. I updated designs to include an experience in the case of pending signatures from the respective parties.

Final Designs

In spirit of leaving things better than how I found them, I created actual Figma components with variants out of the old assets and created new components that aligned with our Fast Track 401(k) principles.

The design system at the time catered to the B2B2C experience which boasted large and flashy elements, but didn't consider complex and data-heavy workflows. These "components" didn't use variants in order to be customized; they could only be customized by toggling the visibility of their layers. I reworked these components to be flexible across all of our product lines and made sure they were easy to use by other designers.

Several new components I created for the product.

Final product with the new design system facelift.

Impact

Fast Track 401(k) was first released in beta to customers using our partner payroll provider and then to everyone else in September 2023. In the first week of its public release, we saw an increase of 900% signups.

Human Interest achieved preferred partner status and hit a recordbreaking amount of signups, validating that there is a market of savvy but busy admins who prefer self-serve. Another result of this successful project was that the company created a whole business group to support Fast Track 401(k). Read more about the product release here.

Fast Track 401(k)

Designed Fast Track 401(k), a simplified and empowering self-onboarding product, to give businesses the confidence to launch their first retirement plan in just minutes.