Human Interest | 2020 - 2023
Role
Design Lead: Research and end-to-end design execution and evaluation (prototyping + moderated user testing + design systems)
Highlights
900% increase in referral plan signups
Human Interest stays a preferred 401(k) partner to top SMB payroll provider
Business Problem
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.
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
mid-research update #2
Final Designs
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
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.
Next Project
personal project | 2023 - present
Personal design library available to the Figma Community.
View work