The onboarding is broken
This is an assignment during April for TradeView Markets for the Senior Product Designer role. In this case I show you how I redesigned the KYC activation flow for an international broker — and what I learned about the difference between visibility and motivation.
Context
A complete design process in 4 acts — from diagnosis to validation metrics. So the product team sent me 8 screens as resources for the assesstment.
Problem
Tradeview Markets is a global broker with over 20 years of operation — regulated in the Cayman Islands, Malta, Mauritius, and Labuan. Their client portal has a critical problem: users who complete registration but skip KYC verification (ID + Proof of Address) during onboarding and never come back to finish it.
No verification → no active trading account → no revenue. The problem wasn’t technical. It was a design problem.
The challenge
Design 2 high-impact interventions that reduce friction and increase account activation rates. The brief was explicit: not looking for quantity — looking for criterion, clarity, and depth.
Key technical constraint: the identity verification provider’s flow cannot be modified. I could only design what happens before and after it.
What I did
I first diagnosed the 4 existing touchpoints (email, dashboard, notification, and modal). I identified that the problem wasn’t visibility — the user already knew they had pending items. It was motivation and friction.
I chose the 2 moments of highest user intent and completely reframed the experience: from “you’re missing something” to “you’re one step away from something.” I designed mobile-first based on a clear data point: over 60% of traffic comes from mobile.
The impact
Two interventions with complete screens, user flows, design decision annotations, and proposed validation metrics. The deliverable included a Brief version and an Extended version — honoring what the brief asked for while demonstrating depth of thinking.
The biggest win: the most important copy change didn’t require a single new component. Just a shift in perspective.
Diagnosis: 8 screens. 4 touchpoints. 2 real problems.
I reviewed every existing touchpoint. Most had visibility — what they lacked was intent.
01
Activation email
The CTA leads to the portal homepage — not the verification flow. The user arrives and has to figure out what to do. No urgency. No time estimate. No real personalization.
Discarded
02
Initial dashboard
Two signals competing at the same time: a peripheral toast and an empty state that misdiagnoses the problem — “You don’t have a live account” when the user DOES have an account. They just need to verify.
Intervened
03
Persistent notification
Always visible = always invisible. An alert that never changes loses urgency over time. The brain filters it as background noise after the first visit.
Discarded
04
Blocking modal
The highest-intent moment — the user wants to transact. The modal interrupts correctly but doesn’t convert. It creates friction without resolving it. The CTA “Submit document(s)” is a door with no window.
Intervened
“It wasn’t a visibility problem.
It was a motivation problem.
The user already knew. They just needed
a reason to act.”
— Jorge Rivera · UX Diagnosis · Tradeview Markets