Three flows, or one
Three account types made three flows the obvious build. But three flows means compliance rules drifting apart in three places every time regulation changes.
Branching is the system's job, not the applicant's.
One adaptive portal could ask each applicant only what applied to them — and give the business a single source of truth to maintain.
Three account types, one system
- The obvious buildThree separate flows, one per account type. Every regulatory change applied three times, and drifting three ways.
- The other extremeOne generic form for every case. A single source of truth, but every applicant wades through rules that are not theirs.
- What I builtOne adaptive portal that branches internally. The applicant sees only what their case requires, and the business keeps one set of compliance rules.
View my comment
Three account types made three flows the obvious build. I recommended one system to a CTO and MD — the real cost of three wasn't the UI, it was three sets of compliance rules drifting apart on every regulation change.
One adaptive journey
The portal identifies the account type at entry and adapts everything downstream — fields, document requirements, compliance gates, sequence. An applicant sees a form that asks exactly what their situation requires. Identity verification was designed into the flow rather than bolted on: face verification with clear guidance, email confirmation, and PIN-based authentication for white-label partners, whose end customers needed secure access without ever seeing the underlying platform.
See the same flow from each user's perspective — switch the account type and watch how the form, documents and steps change.
Your details
Documents required
Your application
Making the process visible
The research finding that shaped the interface: opacity, not effort, was what made onboarding painful. So the design made state visible everywhere — contextual guidance at each step, validation at the point of entry in plain language, and real-time status tracking with notifications replacing the email-chase. Across testing rounds, completion improved when validation happened at the point of entry rather than at submission, and the chase-up queries that defined the old process didn't follow the new one into testing.
View my comment
The research finding that reframed everything: opacity, not effort, was the pain. Once I believed that, "make every state visible" became the whole design, not a polish pass at the end.
What it changed
I led the move to one system with the CTO and Managing Director and carried it through build. The branching is rule-based, wired to the back-end policy rules, so every gate maps to something compliance can certify.
Reflection
The choice of one system over three was architectural as much as design, validated in a one-month sprint with the CTO and Managing Director, then carried through build. But it needed engineering in the room earlier. Branch points where account-type rules conflicted surfaced late and had to be reopened, a sequencing call I would make differently, and the clearest lesson this project taught.