Turning a 14-step bank onboarding into a calm, three-minute first impression.

Details

Role:: Product Designer
Timeline:: 2025 · 6 weeks
Skills:: UX, Flows, Prototyping
Team:: 3 — designer, PM, eng lead

Overview

Harbor is a digital-first bank. New customers were dropping off during a long, anxious onboarding. I reworked the flow end-to-end — fewer steps, clearer states, and a tone that reassures rather than interrogates.

Tldr

The first three minutes decide whether someone trusts a bank.

I cut onboarding from 14 steps to 6, rewrote every error and waiting state, and prototyped the whole flow for usability testing before a line of production code.

Harbor

Outcome

Completion up, support tickets down — and a flow the team is proud of.

In testing, every participant completed onboarding unaided. The biggest win was tone: people described the new flow as “calm,” a word no one used about the old one.