Product Design
UX Research
Regulated fintech
Fewer than one in ten remote verification calls were finishing.
I went to the field before touching a single screen.
Hero visual — pantallas reconstruidas
Pendiente: export de Figma, marca inventada y datos falsos
Role
Senior Product Designer — field research, usability testing, UX/UI, both sides of the flow
Team
Product Owner (client side), engineering, stakeholders — sole designer
When
Jun–Jul 2026
Status
Approved by engineering and stakeholders. Build paused on a legal registration of the app.
Details, data and visuals have been changed to protect the client. Happy to go deeper on a call.
The problem
A mechanism that worked on paper and almost never in practice
A regulated financial service needed to confirm something about a customer visually, without sending anyone to their home. The mechanism was a video call with an advisor.
The failure was expensive in both directions. Every call that fell apart meant dispatching a person physically, and every customer who dropped out was a process that stalled.
What nobody could say was why. The assumption in the room was connectivity: bad signal, cheap phones, noisy homes. That assumption is what sent me to the field instead of to Figma.
< 1 in 10
eligible customers completed the verification call
Baseline before the redesign
What I found
Ten findings. Two of them had never been documented.
I observed three advisors through live sessions with real customers, interviewed them afterwards, and audited the product end to end while it was running.
The first undocumented failure was a blank screen: under a specific condition the call would open to nothing, and neither side could recover. Advisors had built a workaround so routine they no longer reported it — they had stopped seeing it as a failure and started seeing it as a step.
The second was an audio echo everyone had filed as a technical defect. It wasn’t. The echo only appeared in one particular sequence of the flow, which meant no audio fix would ever have removed it.
It was a flow-architecture problem wearing a bug’s clothes.
The connectivity theory turned out to explain almost none of it.
Análisis temático
Los diez hallazgos colapsados en dos temas — la prueba de que sintetizaste, no sólo recolectaste
Three decisions
01
Trust is part of usability, so design for it
Decided — rebuild the welcome screen around the institution’s identity and photographs of real people.
Why — the customer is being asked to turn on a camera and show something private to a stranger, on behalf of an institution handling their money. The blocker was never comprehension, it was trust. In an A/B test, 91% preferred the new screen — and not one of them explained the preference in terms of clarity.
Discarded
The neutral, minimal welcome that is the category default — less clutter, faster to load, fewer things to localise.
Bienvenida actual
La versión que perdió el A/B
Bienvenida nueva
Identidad y rostros. 91% la prefirió
02
Fix the sequence, not the symptom
Decided — treat the echo as a flow problem and change the sequence that produced it.
Why — the echo was reproducible only in one path through the flow. An audio fix would have chased a symptom that wasn’t caused by audio, and the team would have burned a sprint proving nothing was wrong. Naming it correctly is what made it cheap to fix.
Discarded
Filing it to engineering as an audio defect, which is what it had been called for months.
Diagrama del flujo
Dónde aparecía el eco — una ruta, no el audio
03
Design it as a shared capability, not a feature
Decided — add a configuration matrix so the same verification flow could serve other areas of the institution, with different rules per use case.
Why — the underlying mechanism — confirm something visually, remotely, with a human on the line — wasn’t specific to one process. Scoping it narrowly would have guaranteed a second, nearly identical build within a year.
Discarded
Shipping it scoped to the team that commissioned it.
Matriz de configuración
Las reglas por caso de uso: un flujo, varios usos
The result
Flujo del cliente — móvil
Pantallas reconstruidas: marca inventada, datos falsos
Flujo del asesor — escritorio
El otro lado del mismo rediseño
9 of 11
rated the redesigned process “very clear”
Usability test, 11 participants
0
rated it difficult or neutral
Same test
91%
preferred the new welcome screen
A/B test with the same 11 participants
“I feel like I’m making the deal with a person, not with a company.”
Participant, usability test
Engineering and stakeholders approved the redesign. The build is paused on a legal registration of the application — outside the design, and outside the team.
What I learned
In a regulated service, trust isn’t a layer on top of usability — it is usability.
The signals that moved preference weren’t layout or copy: they were the ones that told the customer who was on the other side. And the most expensive failure in the flow had been invisible for months, because the people living with it had stopped calling it a failure.
What I changed to protect the client
This case describes real work for a client I can’t name. The domain is described one level up, client figures are given as proportions, and every visual was rebuilt from scratch with invented branding and fake data. The research, the decisions and the reasoning are unchanged.