Understanding UX barriers to investment account onboarding

The Challenge

Our client, an investment management company, had made incremental changes to their digital onboarding journey over a number of years. With data pointing to many potential customers dropping out, they wanted to identify the pain points in the journey, in order to find ways to address any shortfalls and improve conversion.

System Concepts were selected to take on the project due to our experience supporting financial service organisations, knowledge of Consumer Duty rules, and rigorous approach to user research. We spent time upfront familiarising ourselves with the onboarding journey, whilst getting to know the team, their hypotheses, and the scope of what could be changed.

What we did

It was important to recruit those with a range of investing experience, affluence, intents, and reasons for dropping out, but most importantly who had recently been through the journey in real life. We worked collaboratively with the client to reach out to potential participants who had recently abandoned their onboarding experience, then conducted thorough screening, to shortlist a final sample of 18 people with good representation.
To ensure we could explore the journey, including screens of interest, in detail, we conducted 75-minute one-to-one sessions with participants over Zoom. We prepared a session guide in advance, and broke the dialogue into two key parts:

1. Background & Reflection

We started by understanding each participant’s financial situation, including any financial goals, and their attitude towards investing, to give context to their decision to begin the onboarding journey. Our researcher then explored this further, by encouraging participants to reflect on their recent experience, capturing their hopes, thought process, and overall impressions of the investment management company.

2. Naturalistic walkthrough

The sessions continued to a walkthrough of the onboarding screens using a Figma prototype, which saved time and overcame privacy concerns by pre-filling example personal details. We used a think aloud protocol combined with lines of questioning to capture both retrospective and fresh reactions to each screen, focusing on participant’s understanding, sentiment, and confidence to continue. At points with a higher number of dropouts, we spent more time evaluating the content to test our client’s hypotheses.

We delivered a detailed insights report, focusing on the barriers to onboarding throughout the journey. Each barrier was presented as a concise finding such as ‘Ambiguous language’, with specific examples and participant verbatim quotes to provide reasoning and bring it to life. We also pulled out content that was working well and made participants feel informed and confident, to reinforce the positives and show the team what to aim towards. Our 10 core recommendations for improvement further helped to focus their development work.

The project culminated with an in-person debrief at the client’s offices, where we presented a condensed version of our report. To build understanding and engagement, the insights were supported by video clips from across the sessions, which showed participants interacting with and feeding back on the screens. These helped to tell a story through the progression of the journey, highlighting points of frustration, confusion and uncertainty.

“I’m always sceptical trying out a new agency for UX Research, especially with something as critical and complicated as onboarding our investing app, but System Concepts exceeded my expectations. This has been a really smooth project, with persuasive, specific and useful observations and recommendations. My stakeholders in product and leadership are impressed. Two things in particular have made the recommendations compelling: the quality of the recruit meant it was very hard for colleagues to push back on the relevance of the feedback, and the usage of short, punchy video clips in the debrief made the recommendations inarguable.”
Lead User Researcher, Client (Investment Management Company)

Benefits

Grounded in real-world experiences

The recruitment approach meant that all participants had shown a legitimate interest in investing with our client, with a range of mindsets and intents when beginning the journey. Some were looking for a specific type of investment, whereas others were new to investing and didn’t have a set product in mind. Our findings therefore accounted for varying user needs, while being grounded by the actions participants had taken prior to the research. For example, some had gone on to invest with other investment managers, allowing us to reinforce where those companies had better met their needs.

Clear prioritisation of opportunities

The onboarding journey included several stages, meaning we identified a ton of insights across multiple screens. In addition to providing detailed feedback for each step, we produced 12 key takeaways and identified the 5 steps which presented the biggest issues for users. Armed with this and their analytics data, our client was able to prioritise their efforts to focus on the biggest opportunities to better support users and increase conversion.

Traction within the business

Our deliverables received high praise, with the debrief providing powerful momentum for stakeholders to share the insights more widely across the business. Six weeks on, we were pleased to hear that the key takeaways had been presented at a company-wide meeting (with further positive feedback), and solutions to the main barriers were being scoped after discussion with the Compliance and Legal, and Product marketing teams.