TL;DR
- I led the design execution in overhauling our oldest codebase to provide a modernized, mobile-native account opening experience
- Drove the vision for enabling account opening within 5 minutes
- Notable impact:
- Reduced account opening errors from 27% to 11%
- Reduced account opening time from 10 hours to 5 minutes
- Reprioritized launching Cash as an add-on account opening experience over our scheduled M1b launch:
- Allowed the Financial Services team to launch the Cash product 3 months earlier than planned
- $1 billion deposits in first 3 months
- Industry-leading 5% APY
Goals
- Overhaul our oldest codebase
- Create mobile-native account opening experience; currently clients can only open accounts on web, and mobile web experience is sub-optimal
- Overhaul entire on-boarding experience to present a warm welcome to prospective clients in order to build a long-term financial relationship
Research
Project kicked off with a 5-day GV Design Sprint
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Brought in-house experts from our internal Client Services, Brokerage Operations, Product and Engineering teams to gain context and empathy for existing complexity and client frustrations over our clunky account opening process
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Created multiple concepts that fed into an overall experience map:

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Realized we had to break the project into multiple parts in order to ship meaningful improvements to clients ASAP; sequenced as:
- M1 (infra-focused)
- M1a: consolidate steps to simplify choosing a funding source
- Expedited if client had previously linked funding sources
- M1b: mobile-native add-on account opening (taxable and IRA account types)
- M1c: new account opening (taxable and IRA account types)
- M1d: long-term strategy for merchandizing optional investment strategies
- M1e–g: new account opening (other account types, e.g. joint, trust, 529)
- M2: overhaul risk tolerance presentation
- M3: overhaul pre-funded account page
Wireframes and Mockups

Wireframes of representative screens

Integrating Intuit TurboTax© into our existing signup flow diagram
Curveballs
Along the way, we encountered a few speed bumps:
- Our Design Sprint prototype got lambasted by leadership for violating a primary principle of not leveraging linking external databases to automate the account opening process (see result below)
- The company was receiving a small (but amplified) amount of negative feedback around the presentation of our PassivePlus suite of investment strategies; result