I came onboard at HSBC to tackle an interesting challenge: our millennial customers in Hong Kong were signing up in record numbers, but our onboarding experience wasn't quite hitting the mark. These users made up half of our new accounts and drove a 30% growth in early 2021 – great news for our Asian wealth strategy, but it highlighted a key problem. The traditional relationship manager approach that worked for years just wasn't connecting with how millennials wanted to bank.
I saw an opportunity to completely rethink how these first-time users could handle their money transfers, starting fresh with an onboarding experience built around their actual needs.
Our first-time bankers would drop off the moment things got confusing - and we had plenty of confusing stuff. Banking terms that made sense to us but baffled everyone else. A clunky experience that broke when users switched devices. And the classic problem of getting young users to actually download and stick with our app.
My job was to turn this maze into a clear path that made sense to someone who'd never touched banking before - keeping them engaged from their first click to their first transfer.
I mapped the millennial onboarding journey to pinpoint critical friction areas. This high-level visualization revealed two major opportunities we couldn't ignore: a concerning drop-off during account setup and fragmented support touchpoints that felt impersonal to users.
By identifying these key moments, I focused our design team on targeted interventions where they mattered most. The journey mapping exercise transformed abstract user pain points into tangible design priorities that aligned with both our UX north star and business objectives. This strategic approach let us tackle the right problems rather than getting lost in surface-level fixes.
I started by getting to know our actual users - not just through data, but by sitting down with them and spotting patterns with our product team. Three types of millennials kept coming up:
The Shop Smarter (late 20s) - Smart spenders who wanted a simple way to track their money and catch the best deals, all in one place.
The Rainy Day Saver (early 30s) - Tech folks looking to automate their savings and get better rates for their emergency funds.
The Dream Vacationer (mid-20s) - Creative types saving up for their next big trip, without dipping into their travel funds.
Just want to see where my money goes, you know? Like a heads up before I blow my whole paycheck. Keep me from those random Amazon purchases at 2am.
Andrew | The Shop Smart User
29 years old, avid online shopper, looks for deals and price compares
I'm not trying to get rich or anything, but yeah - would be nice if my savings actually did something. Just set it up once and let it grow. Life's expensive enough already.
Michelle | The Rainy Day Saver
32 years old, engineer, cautious and risk averse personality
My Instagram feed is full of places I want to go - but saving for trips is hard. Need somewhere to put that travel money where I won't touch it for, like, random takeout or whatever.
Jennifer | The Dream Vacation Planner
26 years old, creative profession, loves to travel and experience new cultures
I built a system that connects all the ways millennials interact with our bank. These wireframes show how we linked the mobile app, emails, website, and chat support into one smooth experience.
The big "aha" moment? Users don't care about channels—they just expect the bank to remember them whether they're on their phone or laptop. By designing these connections early on, we created natural stepping stones that guided new users toward making their first money transfer, with familiar visuals and language that made them feel recognized at every turn.
We kept the visuals and messaging consistent across channels while playing to each platform's strengths. The personalization runs deeper than just showing their name—we carried forward their specific goals and choices at each step, creating a sense of "the bank remembers me" that significantly boosted confidence among first-time bankers.
These screens showcase how we deliver help exactly when users need it—through subtle in-app banners and supportive messages that connect to live chat support or offer a simple way to schedule an in-person appointment.
We designed these touchpoints to appear at potential confusion points, offering a lifeline before frustration sets in. This proactive approach prevented dropoffs at critical moments, especially for first-time bankers navigating unfamiliar territory.
Our email strategy evolved to focus on bite-sized tasks presented one at a time. Rather than overwhelming new users with everything they needed to do, we created a series of milestone emails that guided them step by step. Each email had a single clear call to action, building momentum through small wins.
This approach was particularly effective with our millennial audience, who responded well to this progressive disclosure strategy. The emails felt more like a helpful guide than a corporate communication, creating a more engaging experience that drove significantly higher completion rates.
While innovating on the user experience, we made sure to build on HSBC's core design foundation. We leveraged the existing HSBC color palette while expanding it to create a more digital-friendly system.
The components we designed weren't just for this project—they became reusable assets across platforms. The design system work we did here has since been adopted by other teams across HSBC, extending the impact of our work well beyond the initial scope.
Check this out - when we stopped acting like a bank and started acting like actual humans:
24.5% more email clicks - because we finally talked like real people
15% fewer people gave up during app registration
18% drop in people giving up on their first money transfer - huge win for newbies
Not gonna lie, seeing these numbers felt pretty sweet. All those coffee shop user interviews and quick tests paid off. We took the most boring thing ever (banking, right?) and made it... not suck.
My favorite part? Simple won. Like, really won. Just help people do their thing, skip the finance lecture, and watch them actually stick around.
