Context
The John Hancock Retirement Plan Services mobile app was built to give retirement plan participants a unified digital experience — helping them enroll, track, and manage their 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 completing enrollment — which meant the core product wasn't doing its job.
The window when a new employee is most motivated to enroll in their plan is the first few weeks of a new job. Miss that window and re-engagement becomes significantly harder. Every day of friction was a compounding loss.
The Problem
70% of users who created an account abandoned the enrollment flow before completing it. They were showing intent — downloading the app, creating credentials, starting enrollment — and then disappearing.
The problem was real. But we didn't know where in the flow it was happening, or why — because the enrollment funnel wasn't instrumented.
Discovery
The first step was instrumentation. Once we could see where users dropped, the pattern was clear: abandonment clustered at two specific steps — investment selection and contribution rate.
I met with a diverse segment of users across age groups and financial literacy levels to understand why. What came back was specific: the app was requiring users to read a prospectus on their mobile device before selecting an investment.
A prospectus is a dense legal document — often 50+ pages — designed for print. Asking someone to read it on a 6-inch screen, mid-enrollment, with an investment decision at the end, was the wall. Most people hit it, felt overwhelmed, and closed the app.
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.
The Three Friction Points
Usability testing surfaced three specific blockers beyond the prospectus wall:
The Solution
Working with Legal, Compliance, Marketing, and educators, I recognized that paper-based enrollment campaigns had already solved the prospectus problem. Participants would mail back a signed tear-off card, enrolling at plan defaults. Legal had already approved that mechanism.
The digital equivalent: one-tap enrollment at plan defaults. The prospectus was still delivered — just after enrollment, not as a prerequisite to it. Because the mechanism was functionally equivalent to the already-approved postcard process, the legal review was significantly faster.
Each of the three other friction points was fixed prioritized by enrollment impact, not engineering effort.
Results
Within three months of launch:
The deferral rate lift is worth noting: participants who enrolled at defaults — rather than 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.
The Compounding Effect
This work became the foundation for five years of consistent mobile growth. The app grew to 1.3M monthly active users at a sustained rate of +25K per month. None of that compounds if the enrollment flow keeps losing 70% of users at the door.
The headline number — 1.3M MAU — is the result of consistent friction reduction over time. Every enrollment optimization tied to a measurable enrollment rate. The compounding effect of five years of consistent improvement is what produced the growth, not any single release.