Digital Onboarding is the online platform enabling advisors and clients to create and manage accounts at Charles Schwab. My specific role was responsible for the UX design pertaining to the advisor experience of creating ‘digital envelopes’. This encompassed selecting client(s), determining the type of account(s), adding features and contingent actions, uploading documents, reviewing those details and sending the necessary information to their client to complete their portion of the process.

For the purpose of this case study, it will be focused specifically on the research conducted with individual advisors to identify the positives and the negatives throughout the end-to-end experience. Given their familiarity with the process, advisor feedback helped identify key areas of improvement allowing for an enhanced day-to-day workflow. While the platform continues to evolve by introducing new features and capabilities, early metrics showed positive results when the identified enhancements were put into production:

• 50% of new accounts opened digitally

• 7,700+ monthly active firms with 28k+ users (representing 71% adoption)

• 85% advisor satisfaction (based on 4,500+ experience survey responses)

  
  

A more in-depth breakdown about the project can be found below. Due to NDAs and proprietary information, images and certain details related to this project are not able to be shared.

DEFINE

The Digital Onboarding platform was created to replace the outdated physical process requiring ‘wet signatures’ and mailing documents back and forth between advisors and clients. The main goal of this research and design effort was to collect insights and pain points of to the end-to-end experience. Being responsible for the advisor portion of the Digital Onboarding experience, our team had the benefit of knowing exactly who our users (currently) were and had a pool of well-qualified testing participants to choose from.

We set up 6 individual research studies with current Charles Schwab advisors. The testing involved outlining a scenario intended to walk advisors through the experience while the team observed and recorded the usability feedback. The advisors had not seen or interacted with the design but were familiar with the process of setting up a new account based on their previous experience.

Some insights we were looking for:

Which inflection point(s) caused hesitation or confusion?

Did the workflow feel intuitive (follow their mental model)?

Did any design choices negatively impact their progress?

What content could be improved for better clarity?

DISTILL

After completing the 6 advisor research sessions, the team reviewed and analyzed their insights. While there were positive responses to the new experience, the negative feedback and questions highlighted where the design was falling short of advisor needs. Some of them included:

• Being a new platform, advisors expressed not only wanting to be comfortable and familiar with their side of the experience, but also that of their client. They outlined they frequently have to guide their clients to complete their side of the process.

• Certain functionality and interaction was vague. For example, competing CTAs led to confusion on how to advance in the workflow, it was unclear how to edit client information once added, and it wasn’t intuitive certain components were linked/clickable.

• The order in which certain information was being collected didn’t match advisor’s mental model.

These and many other pieces of feedback were evaluated to determine what some recurring themes were along with what could or could not be addressed based on platform limitations. The UX team’s recommended changes based on all of these considerations were presented to the extended team and stakeholders to get the needed approval.

DESIGN

Once the larger team and stakeholders aligned on which improvements should be made, design, content and information architecture changes began.

Advisors were frustrated about the order in which information was gathered for certain sections. Given some of them had decades of experience, they had formed a mental model of how the workflow should progress. To help familiarize them with the new system, the order information was collected in various forms or pages was adjusted to match what they expected while still being able to maintain the existing system platform.

They also expressed confusion about certain pages containing multiple CTAs located close to one another. This was a known detriment of the platform going into testing that we had little control over based on how the system was built. However, I explored a few design alternatives that led to the adoption of a new pattern helping to distinguish the primary CTA from the secondary.

Other design elements were also revised; the left rail navigation was re-styled to appear clickable to help indicate it could be used in addition to the primary page CTAs move through the workflow and certain actions were rethought to give them more visual prominence on the page to help better stand out to advisors.

Lastly, a guided walkthrough was being developed and implemented for another service within Charles Schwab. Working in collaboration with that team, we were able to utilize a similar tool for the Digital Onboarding advisor experience. This highlighted new features and functionality when advisors first used the platform and could be referenced at any point afterward.

DELIVER

Given most of the design changes that occurred were adjusting the styling, placement or order elements were appearing, the development lift was relatively minor. The development team was involved in discussions throughout the process so they were aware of the change requests that would be necessary.

How, it is still important to deliver the necessary documentation. Figma design files and prototypes were uploaded to InVison via Craft for the development team to inspect and build from. Spec files outlining padding, typography, colors and interaction were also provided to ensure end product matched designs pixel-for-pixel. Once the build was prepared in production, I performed QA to ensure the visual and interaction parameters matched the intended experience.

With these enhancements implemented, follow up studies were completed to gather ongoing feedback from advisors. New features and functionality are continuously being evaluated to bring into the Digital Onboarding experience. As the metrics outlined above indicate, adoption should only continue to increase. Ongoing refinements and improvements will result in a more efficient process for both advisors and clients when creating accounts with Charles Schwab.