Meridian
- User research
- Mobile app design
- Prototyping
- Usability testing
- Remote engagement
- 10 weeks
Meridian is a challenger bank whose account opening took nineteen screens and lost more than half of the people who started it. The screens were individually reasonable and collectively exhausting.
We ran moderated sessions with fourteen applicants, then prototyped in two-week loops with Meridian’s compliance lead in the room. Compliance was a design constraint from day one rather than a review gate at the end, which is why the shorter flow survived legal.
Onboarding cut from nineteen screens to six
A component set shared across squads
Drop-off measured, not guessed
Six screens, not nineteen
Most of the nineteen existed because a form field had nowhere else to live. Grouping by what the applicant is thinking about — who I am, what I earn, what I want — rather than by which system consumes the answer collapsed the flow without dropping a single required field.
Progress you can trust
The old flow showed a progress bar that lied. The new one names the remaining steps and never adds one, so a person who is two minutes in knows whether they have five minutes or fifteen left.
Measured, not guessed
Drop-off is instrumented per field, not per screen. When a question starts costing applicants, the team sees which one within a day rather than arguing about the funnel at the end of a quarter.
Sample content
We had been told the flow could not get shorter without dropping a compliance requirement. They got it to six screens with every requirement intact, and had our compliance lead in the room while they did it.
Rowan Iversen
