Context
The John Hancock Retirement Plan Services (JHRPS) mobile app was built to give retirement plan participants an intuitive, unified digital experience — helping them learn about and take action on their retirement savings from their phone.
The vision was right. The enrollment flow was not. After launch, we had downloads but not engagement. Users were creating accounts and stopping before they ever enrolled in their plan — which meant the product wasn't delivering on its core purpose.
The core tension in retirement fintech: The moment a new employee is most motivated to enroll in their plan is immediately after starting a new job. That window is short. If the product creates friction during that window, you lose them — and getting them back is significantly harder.
Personas
Two primary personas shaped the product, but one drove the prioritization decision.
23, San Francisco. First full-time job. Manages her financial life on her phone — no personal computer. Wants to maximize her employer match and pay off student loans. Tech-comfortable but overwhelmed by financial decisions.
54, New York City. Marketing manager. Wants to retire early. Prefers manual processes. Reluctant to use new technology. Will benefit from improvements, but requires more change management.
The call: focus on the new-to-workforce persona. They have the highest motivation to act, the lowest friction with technology, and the most to gain from getting enrollment right early. The high-income earner would benefit too — but their gains were smaller and the stakeholder management required was higher.
The Problem
After launching the app, the enrollment funnel told a clear story: 70% of users who created an account abandoned the plan enrollment flow before completing it.
That's not a minor drop-off. That's the product failing at its primary job. Users were showing intent — they downloaded the app, created credentials, started enrollment — and then disappearing.
The question wasn't whether there was a problem. The question was where in the flow it was happening, and why.
Discovery
Analytics narrowed the drop-off to two specific steps: investment selection and contribution rate. That was enough to tell us where. I still needed to know why.
I met with a diverse segment of users — across age, financial literacy level, and device type. What came back was consistent and specific: the app was requiring users to read a prospectus on their mobile device before they could select an investment.
A prospectus is a dense legal document — often 50+ pages — designed for print. Asking a 23-year-old to read one on a 6-inch screen, mid-enrollment, with the expectation that they'd make an investment decision afterward, was the wall. Most people hit it, felt overwhelmed, and left.
The problem wasn't that users didn't want to enroll. It was that the product put a compliance requirement directly in the critical path — and framed it as a prerequisite to taking action. The compliance need was real. The placement was wrong.
This reframed the challenge. It wasn't a UX polish problem or a copywriting problem. It was a structural flow problem with a compliance constraint baked in. Any solution had to thread that needle.
The Solution
I worked across Legal, Compliance, Marketing, and retirement education specialists to understand the constraint space. During those conversations, something clicked: this problem had already been solved in the analog world.
For decades, John Hancock had run paper-based enrollment campaigns using tear-off postcards. A participant would receive a mailer, tear off the card, sign it, and mail it back — enrolling themselves at the plan's default contribution rate and default investment options. The postcard didn't require reading a prospectus first. Legal had already approved that mechanism.
The digital equivalent: give users the option to enroll at plan defaults with a single tap — bypassing the investment selection and prospectus wall entirely. The prospectus would still be delivered (as required), but after enrollment, not as a prerequisite to it. Participants could always go back and customize their investment selection later.
Because the mechanism was functionally equivalent to the already-approved postcard process, the legal and compliance review was significantly faster. We weren't asking for a new approval — we were applying an existing one to a new channel.
Why It Worked
The fastest path through a compliance constraint is often a solution that compliance has already approved. The analog world had been solving the prospectus problem for 30 years. Recognizing that the paper postcard mechanism was legally equivalent to a digital default enrollment — and that we could borrow it — compressed months of legal review into weeks.
This is the kind of decision that looks obvious in hindsight but requires understanding the full system: the user problem, the regulatory environment, the organization's existing approved processes, and the cross-functional stakeholders who have to sign off. You can't find a solution like this by looking at the product in isolation.
The insight also reframed the design direction. Instead of trying to make the prospectus experience better — better formatting, better copy, progressive disclosure — we removed it from the critical path entirely. Simplifying is almost always the right answer. Prettifying a broken flow rarely is.
Results
Within the first three months after launch:
The deferral rate increase is worth noting separately. Participants who enrolled at defaults — rather than navigating investment selection under cognitive load — were more likely to stay enrolled and maintain or increase their contribution rate over time. Getting someone enrolled at a reasonable default is better for their retirement outcome than overwhelming them into abandoning.
This work became the foundation for the enrollment growth that followed. The mobile app grew to 1.3M monthly active users over five years. None of that happens if the enrollment flow keeps losing 70% of users at the door.