Content
Role
Lead Product Designer
Design Team
Tommy Partl, Senior UX Writer
Timeline
2025 - 2026
222K accounts converted to paperless statements in just six days.
As part of the broader onboarding redesign, I identified an opportunity to remove friction from Paperless Statements enrollment. I redesigned the flow to eliminate an unnecessary account-selection step and automatically pre-select eligible accounts for clients.
The streamlined experience helped convert 222K accounts within six days. At an estimated $10 in annual cost savings per paperless account, that adoption represents approximately $3M in annual cost savings for KeyBank.
A first impression that needed a rethink
Opening a new bank account is one of the few moments when clients are actively engaged and motivated to get started. Yet KeyBank's onboarding experience lived inside a horizontal carousel on the Account Summary page, where setup tasks competed with promotional content and everyday banking activities for attention.
While users could complete onboarding tasks, the experience lacked a clear sense of progress, making it difficult to understand what was required. Completed tasks stayed visible, important features required manual enrollment, and progress felt static rather than rewarding.
The experience technically gave clients things to do, but it didn't give them a strong sense of where they were, what mattered most, or what came next.
The opportunity
I saw an opportunity to rethink onboarding as a guided journey, one that helps clients focus on what matters first, builds confidence through visible progress, and gradually introduces additional ways to personalize their banking experience that also increases adoption of KeyBank's digital services.
From a task list to a guided experience, the central question became:
How might we transform onboarding from a collection of setup tasks into a guided experience that helps new clients confidently get their accounts ready to use?
Rather than treating onboarding as a checklist of features, I focused on creating an experience that could answer three questions for clients:
What do I need to do? What's already done? What should I do next?
With the opportunity defined, I established four principles to guide the redesign. Each one addressed a different part of the onboarding experience—from helping clients understand where to start to making it easier to complete important actions.
01 — Give onboarding a clear home
Create a dedicated space where clients can understand and manage their onboarding journey without competing with everyday banking.
I designed a dedicated onboarding destination accessible through an entry point on the landing page when clients logged into online banking.
This gave onboarding its own space and allowed the experience to focus entirely on helping new clients get set up.
02 — Prioritize what matters
Make essential setup steps obvious while giving clients the flexibility to explore additional features when they're ready.
With a dedicated destination, I could rethink how the tasks themselves were organized. Not every action has the same level of importance. Clients first need to establish the fundamentals of their account before exploring additional ways to personalize their banking experience.
This shifts onboarding from presenting a list of features to guiding clients through what matters first.
03 — Make progress visible
Reflect completed actions and show clients where they are in the journey so onboarding feels responsive and forward-moving.
The original carousel didn't really acknowledge completion. When a client finished a task, the card remained visible and simply moved to the end of the carousel. The old experience continued presenting completed work instead of reflecting the client's progress.
I redesigned the interaction so onboarding could respond to what clients had already accomplished. Completed tasks could leave the active task list, while a progress indicator gives clients a persistent sense of where they are in the journey.
The experience should feel like it's moving forward with the client.
04 — Remove unnecessary decisions
Reduce the effort required to complete important actions by using smart defaults and removing steps the experience can handle for the client.
One of the clearest examples of this principle was Paperless Statements.
KeyBank already had a Paperless enrollment interstitial, but clients rarely enrolled. The existing experience required users to manually select which eligible accounts they wanted to enroll, adding extra clicks and another decision to the process.
I saw an opportunity to let the system do more of the work. Instead of asking clients to select eligible accounts themselves, the redesigned experience pre-selects eligible accounts. Clients can still review what will be enrolled, but they no longer have to configure a choice the system already understands.
(Visual — show before and after of paperless)
accounts converted in 30 days
unenrollment rate
outperformed previous paperless campaigns
The strongest signal was that clients weren't simply enrolling—they were staying enrolled. With fewer than 1% of users later unenrolling, the redesigned experience helped make Paperless enrollment easier without sacrificing user control.
The project demonstrated how seemingly small interaction decisions—such as removing an unnecessary selection step—can create meaningful outcomes when applied at scale.
The redesigned onboarding experience helped move clients from opening an account to actively using it. By surfacing the actions that mattered most, we improved completion of critical onboarding steps and increased early engagement with key banking products.
who have seen the onboarding experience, completed 100% of required tasks
This helped address a key business issue where accounts had historically closed when clients forgot to fund them within their first 30 days.
increase in direct deposit enrollment
The experience encouraged clients to take the next step in establishing their new account as part of their everyday financial lives.
increase in digital wallet enrollment
More clients added their cards to digital wallets, helping drive earlier card adoption and creating more opportunities for ongoing debit and credit card usage.
Onboarding became a mechanism for driving the behaviors that establish an active banking relationship.
This project changed how I think about onboarding. I initially saw onboarding as a set of tasks that needed to be completed. Through the redesign, I came to see it more as a guided relationship-building moment: the product has an opportunity to establish confidence, help clients understand what matters, and make the next action feel obvious.
The strongest improvements weren't necessarily the biggest visual changes. They came from questioning where clients were being asked to make decisions or do work that the experience could simplify for them.