Making critical documents impossible to miss

Overview

Finio is a responsive wealth platform where individual clients monitor their wealth - where their money is invested, how portfolios perform, gains and losses - and receive documents from their advisors, some of which legally require review and signature.

I led a complete UX/UI redesign of the platform. This case study focuses on the two highest-impact areas: Postbox (advisor messages and time-sensitive documents) and Reports (the performance insights clients rely on to make decisions).

Problem

Clients could not tell which Postbox items were important or required action - everything looked the same. The consequences were severe for a regulated product:

• 67% of clients had to be called by phone and reminded to sign required documents
• Many signed based on the email summary without ever opening the actual document - a compliance risk and a source of follow-up work for advisors
• Support handled 55–65 tickets per month, largely driven by confusion about messages, documents, and completion status
• Finding past documents and reports took real effort once the Postbox filled up

Goals

• Make required actions unmistakable - increase document-signing completion without phone-call chasing
• Reduce support tickets by clarifying message priority, status, and next steps
• Make retrieval fast - better filtering and organization for messages and reports

All of it within strict compliance requirements, consistently across desktop, tablet, and mobile - because most clients check in during short, on-the-go sessions.

Research

Stakeholder interviews

I interviewed the PM, advisors, and developers to map how Postbox messages and document signing work in practice - where users get stuck, what advisors need users to do, and what engineering could support within the timeline. Combined with support-ticket pain points and product analytics, this produced a decision log linking every design change to a specific user need, risk, or technical constraint.

Users

Research clustered into three primary personas, spanning newcomer to power user:

Names, photos, and personal details shown here have been changed to protect participant privacy. The personas are representative archetypes drawn from the research.

Across all three, the shared motivation was the same: staying confidently in control without feeling overwhelmed.

Customer journey

The journey usually starts outside the product, with an advisor's email. Inside, clients scan portfolio performance, then enter the Postbox to review, download, and sign. The journey broke at two decision moments: triage - deciding what needs attention with no priority cues - and pre-signing, where viewing the email summary felt equivalent to viewing the document.

Competitive research

I analyzed 4 direct competitors using a 45-point matrix (UX criteria + usability heuristics). They were strong on performance snapshots and navigation, but most fell short on clear priority and status in inbox-style areas, on making "summary ≠ document" obvious before signing, and on simple report generation. That gap defined the redesign strategy.

Design decisions

Priority is structural, not decorative. The Postbox hierarchy separates action-required items from informational messages - distinct zones, status chips, urgency cues with deadlines - so triage works in a 30-second mobile session.

The signing flow enforces compliance honestly. I redesigned the sequence as open → download → sign/reject, with Sign and Reject disabled until the document is downloaded, plus helper text explaining why. The interface makes the compliant path the only path - without steps that feel bureaucratic.

Tasks stay visible until done. Persistent alerts on the dashboard and in the Postbox keep incomplete actions in view, so the product no longer depends on email - or phone calls - as the source of truth.

Retrieval became a first-class feature. Filtering by status, type, and date; search; and a clearer Reports flow for selecting, generating, and downloading with explicit feedback.

Interactive walkthrough - the Confirm button stays disabled until the recipient downloads and opens the document, preventing blind sign-off.

Reports

From checkboxes and a timeframe to a filterable workspace. Previously, users selected accounts from a bare checkbox list, chose a timeframe, and generated a report - with no way to search or tell accounts apart once a client had more than a handful. I rebuilt it as a searchable, filterable workspace: banks, depots, and cash accounts appear as scannable cards; quick tabs and a full filter panel - by account type, bank, amount range, and a saved "last used" filter - narrow long lists to the exact accounts needed. Selection is explicit, and Download report stays disabled until a valid selection exists, so every export is well-formed.

Interactive walkthrough - the cursor opens Filters, applies the saved filter, then moves to the enabled Download report button. Replay the flow at any time.

Wireframes

I moved from flow sketches into wireframes for the three core screens - Postbox list, message detail with document actions, and the signing state - validating with developers which states were buildable within the timeline (especially disabled actions and persistent alerts), and catching edge cases early: what users see after downloading but before signing, and how items are marked complete.

Early paper wireframes - exploring layout and hierarchy for the Dashboard and Postbox before moving to high fidelity.

Usability testing

I tested the redesigned flows with users across experience levels - from beginners to advanced investors - covering Postbox triage, document actions, and report creation, on desktop and mobile.

What worked: participants could identify action-required messages, filter to a specific document, and complete the open → download → sign sequence without falling back to email.

What needed iteration: some users still tried to sign straight from the message, assuming that reading the message meant viewing the document. I tightened step cues, reinforced the download requirement with the disabled button states, and added helper text at the exact decision point. Remaining refinements were micro-level: clearer status language, more explicit download affordances in Reports.

Impact

Measured over 6 months after release:

Advisors no longer spend time chasing signatures - the product carries the reminder burden.

Learnings

• In regulated products, the honest path must be the easy path. Disabled states with clear explanations outperformed warnings - users don't read warnings, but they understand a button that won't activate yet.
• A decision log earns trust. Linking every design choice to a user need, risk, or technical constraint turned reviews from debates into checklists.
• The most expensive UX failures are invisible in the UI. Nothing "looked broken" before the redesign - the cost showed up as phone calls, support tickets, and compliance risk.