Understanding the Operations Burden

When I joined Human Interest as their first full-time designer, I discovered that our 401(k) setup process was entirely manual. Operations staff would get on phone calls with customers, walk them through complex requirements, and send bespoke email links to one-off forms. Every single customer required individual attention, and with constant operations team turnover, we were burning enormous amounts of time on repetitive status updates.

I spent weeks shadowing operations staff and plan administrators, studying their workflows in forensic detail. What did each field accomplish? How did information flow between systems? When did customers get confused or drop off? I treated these real-world business problems as interface design challenges that could be solved through better UI and automation.

The frustration was palpable. Customers had no visibility into where they stood in the multi-week process, so they’d call asking “What’s the status?” Operations would spend hours each day fielding these calls instead of moving new customers through the pipeline.

Designing Transparency Into Chaos

The breakthrough was realizing that 401(k) setup complexity couldn’t be eliminated—but it could be made transparent. I designed a card-based system where each step in the process became a visual task that customers could see and understand.

The cards unlocked progressively based on where customers were in the process. Some required customer action, others showed external processing steps like government approvals. The key insight was that people don’t mind waiting when they understand why they’re waiting and what happens next.

Working directly with our senior engineer and a junior engineer who had strong UI skills, we built a system where operations could remotely toggle flags to enable or disable steps for specific customers. This gave our team control over the experience while customers maintained visibility into their progress.

Crafting a Premium Experience

This wasn’t just functional—it was crafted. We added animations, sophisticated styling, and proactive notification systems that made the complex process feel premium rather than bureaucratic. The goal was to reinforce Human Interest’s “white glove” positioning by making 401(k) setup feel as polished as any consumer product.

Operations got their own status dashboard showing where every customer stood in the onboarding process. Instead of customers calling to check status, operations could proactively reach out when someone stalled or needed attention.

The Ultimate Validation

The impact was immediate. Support call volume dropped dramatically as customers could finally see their progress without calling. Customer satisfaction improved, and the onboarding experience became a genuine competitive differentiator in an industry that typically prioritized large businesses over the small and medium companies we served.

This tool proved we’d solved something universal: how to make complex, multi-step workflows transparent and manageable for customers while giving operations teams the control they needed to deliver exceptional service.

Fun Fact: The onboarding experience was so intuitive and effective that during a team meeting, our operations manager mentioned a customer had actually asked if they could license the tool for their own product—the ultimate validation that we’d solved a universal problem with workflow transparency.