Case Study
Designing an onboarding experience for complex ownership structures
A regulated business has to know who it's doing business with. That's manageable when the customer is a person, and much harder when it's a company owned by other companies across several jurisdictions.
The Challenge
Vaiie Onboard helps regulated businesses meet their obligations: one source of truth on the customers they take on, and outreach when something is missing.
Structures are the hard part. Ownership sits in layers, spans jurisdictions, and the requirements underneath keep moving. Compliance teams handle it manually, across systems that don't talk to each other.
There was a proof of concept to work from, but the category was still forming. Nothing settled to reference, and plenty of informed opinion on what the product ought to be.
A prototype real enough to get feedback
Outgrowing the proof of concept
I was brought in at the ideation stage to improve the UX of a proof of concept. The team was a product manager and me, supported by compliance expertise, specifications, artefacts and consultants.
Wireframes became high-fidelity mockups and the proof of concept improved, but the technology behind it was becoming the constraint. We needed to move faster than it would let us.
Building something people could use
I built an HTML prototype using Fractal. Being component-based, we could assemble screens from reusable parts and explore ideas faster and at higher fidelity.
That changed what conversations were possible. Instead of working around the proof of concept or flicking through static screens in PowerPoint, everyone from the board to compliance and marketing could use something close to a real product, and their feedback got much clearer.
Moving on from the prototype
From components to a working product
The prototype was deconstructed and ratified by a new engineering team, so the MVP started from something more than most first builds ever have. I built a Figma component library, which made putting the principal screens together much faster. We worked in an agile process, themes through to epics, user stories and tasks, releasing often so we could get feedback from firms.
A new way to group onboarding data
Onboardings wrapped around Dossiers, which shifted the original thinking on how to group and organise data.
The biggest change was a visual structure chart. Businesses were already drawing these, in spreadsheets or Visio, separately from the system that held the actual data. Putting it in the product meant entities got added straight into the structure, with risk and incomplete data surfacing when relevant.
Jon branded our entire suite of regulatory technology tools that sit at the heart of the business.
He brought a real moment of clarity during a period of complexity - from brand identity and product design through to working prototypes, and from managing agencies to working directly with clients, he made it all look effortless.
Lee Bosio CEO, Vaiie
