Onboarding Redesign for Stockbroking & Trading Customers
Redesigned CMC's onboarding flow, cutting application drop-off by 10–15% and support calls by 20% within the first month of release.
Context
CMC's online application was the front door to becoming a customer — and it was losing people at the threshold. Dense early screens and unfamiliar stockbroking jargon made opening an account feel like hard work, driving drop-off, support calls, and lost customers to competitors. I led the redesign of the full journey, working with product, tech, legal, and compliance to balance regulatory requirements with a simpler experience.
Problem
Research surfaced three core problems affecting the customer journey and business growth:
A high-effort application process – Early screens overwhelmed new customers with dense fields and unfamiliar stockbroking jargon, driving 30% drop-off and lost sales opportunities.
Strain on support teams – Over 50% of drop-offs generated support calls, putting pressure on a team already struggling to keep pace with daily customer queries.
Customers lost to competitors – Frustrated users abandoned the process to open accounts with competitors offering a smoother onboarding experience.
[Above image: 3 in 10 new customers abandon the application immediately after completing the first screen – the highest single-step drop in the entire flow.]
[Above image: Old CMC application form – poor visual hierarchy, inconsistent CTAs and suggestion text, and accessibility gaps]
Research
The challenge — synthesising extensive external agency research and choosing methods likely to yield actionable insights within a tight timeframe. I combined qualitative and quantitative approaches to build a complete picture of where and why customers were dropping off.
User interviews — Interviewed 8 stakeholders across sales, tech, legal, and compliance to surface real customer pain points and design constraints.
During these sessions, I observed high levels of frustration with an outdated process that took 20–30 minutes to complete, against a 5-minute expectation at the time (2021). Interviews with tech, legal/compliance, marketing, and finance also surfaced hard constraints — certain jargon-heavy fields couldn't be removed for regulatory reasons, so I focused on clarifying them with inline tooltips instead.
Journey mapping — Mapped the full user flow with the product manager to pinpoint exactly where customers hit friction.
Particularly around missing ID documents or information, so we could design targeted fixes rather than a blanket overhaul.
[Image: Collaborated closely with the product manager to map out only the first several steps of a lengthy user flow for a new customer application.]
Competitive benchmarking — Benchmarked our 10-step process against our main competitor.
After step 2, our customers faced 18 fields, while competitors required just 3 steps at the same stage — giving us a clear, high-impact target for simplification.
[Image: CMC's 10-step application process, including multiple secondary steps per main step, compared to a competitor benchmark of 3 steps.]
Affinity mapping — Synthesised interview responses into clear themes and shared them across teams.
This aligned the business around shared priorities for the redesign.
Solution
1. Reducing friction through UX/UI fundamentals
Built wireframes grounded in core UX/UI principles, tested them with real users, and iterated quickly — each round bringing the experience closer to a genuinely seamless journey.
2. Elevated the UI design
Analysed leading stockbroking and trading apps (CommSec, Stake, Superhero, Pocket) to identify best-in-class patterns, then prototyped, led stakeholder walkthroughs, and refined through multiple rounds of testing.
[Image: Colour palette exploration — retaining CMC's brand identity while improving visual hierarchy, brightness, and contrast to meet accessibility standards]
3. Setting up developers for a smooth build
Created a UI kit defining colour, typography, and components, mocked all desktop and mobile screens, and ran developer walkthroughs to gain their input. Achieved an 80% design-to-build match, with the remaining 20% completed in the next release alongside minor bug fixes.
4. Sharpened the experience post-launch
Collected post-launch feedback and refined the application ahead of the next release:
Added three main tabs giving users a clear sense of momentum and confidence
Converted grey cards to static text after testing showed users expected them to be clickable
Added a clearly visible privacy link in a high-contrast colour, closing a gap from the original design
Applied high-contrast brand colours to primary buttons, boosting accessibility and visibility
[Image: Wireframe to final UI design]
Results
10–15% reduction in application drop-off, directly recovering customers who would previously have abandoned the process
20% decrease in customer support calls, freeing up team capacity while application approvals and acquisitions climbed
100% UI uplift completed across the application interface completed within a tight timeframe, helping new customers start trading and investing faster – and driving increased revenue for the business
[Image: Final desktop UI design]
