The Situation
The data showed the problem. Nobody had asked why yet.
An online trading platform was watching 87% of users who started onboarding never finish it. Every abandoned user had a meaningful chance of calling support instead — and those calls were consuming roughly 10% of daily support capacity.
The internal assumption was hard to argue with: financial compliance is complex, some friction is unavoidable. The team had iterated on the flow and run tests. The exit rate barely moved. What no one had done yet was look at what users were actually experiencing — not the interface, but the lived experience of going through it for the first time.
Research Approach
Three simultaneous lenses — each one informing the others.
To understand an experience this broken, the research ran three streams in parallel rather than sequentially — so findings could build toward a complete picture rather than accumulating gaps.
Platform Analytics
Validated the 87% exit rate and mapped exactly where in the funnel users were dropping off. Most exits were happening early — before meaningful engagement — which focused the rest of the research.
Customer Service & Stakeholder Interviews
CS agents who handled onboarding calls daily had already identified consistent frustration patterns. Product stakeholders were also interviewed to understand what was a genuine compliance requirement — and what had just grown into the flow unchallenged.
Direct User Sessions
In-depth interviews and moderated usability sessions with people who had completed and abandoned the process. Watching users in real time surfaced the exact moments where confidence broke — things the internal team had minimized or never directly observed.
Key Findings
Three fixable problems. None of them compliance.
Across all three research streams, the same three issues emerged with striking consistency. They weren't edge cases — they were hitting every user who went through the flow.
Cognitive Overload — The 109-Question Form
A 109-question form confronted users at the start. The length created fatigue before any sense of progress. Many assumed it would take hours — and left before finding out otherwise. The form hadn't been designed to overwhelm; it had simply grown over time with no one measuring the effect.
Offline Requirements Inside a Digital Product
Identity verification required printing, signing, and physically mailing documents. For digital-native users — many without printers — this was a hard stop, not friction. It directly contradicted every expectation set by the digital product surrounding it.
Complete Silence After Submission
After submitting, users received no confirmation and no indication of what came next. Many assumed something had gone wrong — and called support to find out. This created exactly the support load the company was trying to reduce, entirely due to a missing feedback state.
"The team had assumed that legal and compliance steps were non-negotiable friction. The research showed that none of the three biggest barriers had anything to do with compliance."
What Changed
Targeted fixes. No compliance trade-offs required.
Working with product, design, and compliance teams, the focus was on changes that addressed each barrier directly — without touching any genuine regulatory requirement. Every change was traceable back to a specific finding.
Progressive disclosure — The 109-question form was restructured to surface only essentials upfront, collecting additional information in stages. Users experienced a manageable flow instead of a wall of fields.
Secure digital document upload — Physical mailing replaced with a secure upload flow meeting the same compliance requirements. Verification completed entirely within the product — no printer, no envelope.
Real-time progress and confirmations — Status feedback added at every meaningful step. Users knew where they were, what was received, what came next — removing the silence that was triggering unnecessary support calls.
The Outcome
66% fewer exits — and a team that stopped accepting friction as inevitable.
The reduction in exit rate freed up support capacity meaningfully. But the more durable outcome was internal: the research shifted how the team approached compliance and experience — from treating friction as inevitable to questioning whether each barrier actually needed to be there.
Results
66%
reduction in onboarding exit rate after targeted redesign
↓ 10%
of daily support capacity freed from onboarding-related calls
3
core friction points removed — none required compliance trade-offs