Overview
Human interest (HI) is a 401(k) plan provider for small and medium sized businesses. HI has two products: an admin facing platform for the employers and a participant facing platform for the employees. I led the participant onboarding and platform redesign.
Time Frame: 3 months
Team: 1 Product Manager, 1 Visual Designer, 1 User Researcher, 6 Engineers
My Main Role: Product Designer Tools: Mural, Figma, Zoom
Business Goal
Increase the amount of employees participating in HI's 401(k) self-enroll plan within two weeks of eligibility by end of Q3.
Opportunity
The participation rate in self-enroll plans is 42% compared to 93% of auto-enroll plans. Self-enroll plans make up 53% of HI's plans and require employee to opt into their 401(k).
How might we help people in self-enroll plans opt into their 401(k) and save towards their retirement?
Solution
Reducing the amount of steps during the onboarding flow, distinguishing the steps by level of difficulty and reducing cognitive overload along with investment jargon.
Process
Assumptions: I wrote out needs and use cases participants have when setting their 401(k). This was assumption led with the team providing feedback.
Flow and preliminary sketches: I shortened the onboarding flow by removing sections from the experience and adding it to the dashboard instead. I also began exploring interactions.
Wireframes: I developed some of those sketches into low fidelity wireframes, brought it to the team and discussed tradeoffs.
Visual design: The visual designer had just led a rebrand with the marketing team so I handed off the wireframes to her. I oversaw the visual refresh, ensuring interaction patterns were effectively applied, intuitive to use and consistent across devices.
Team feedback: I led a workshop that assessed the team's confidence in the designs we had iterated on and continued to iterate.
User testing: Throughout this process, we tested various prototypes until we were confident the onboarding flow was easy to digest and users felt confident in choosing their 401(k) contribution and portfolio.
Outcome
The participation rate in a segment of new companies within two weeks of eligibility was a whopping 80% for self-enroll plans compared to the 30% participation rate of a group control used for comparison. Success!
