Designing an onboarding checklist that turned a confusing post-signup dashboard into a clear, guided first step: lifting engagement across Empower's flagship managed account experience.
My Total Retirement is Empower's advisory service: personalized investment strategy, professional account management, and retirement income planning, all in one place. However, when users finished signing up and landed on their new dashboard, they had no context to make sense of it. Faced with a wall of unfamiliar widgets and no clear starting point, most people didn't know what to do first.
The result showed up in the data: low engagement across every dashboard widget under My Total Retirement. The product was doing a lot, and users were absorbing almost none of it.
I partnered with a product manager, a business analyst, and design director. Through preliminary research and usability testing, we pinned down why users stalled at this step — the dashboard explained everything and prioritized nothing, so no single "do this first" ever surfaced.
From there, I ideated with the key decision-makers (product manager, design director, and business analyst) to find a solution that could work not just here, but across other Empower products facing the same post-sign up cliff.
User research and usability testing revealed a few issues:
Design was signed off by both UX and Product, then handed to Engineering — where I stayed close to walk the team through the design and resolve hiccups as they came up in development.
We proposed a setup checklist that surfaced the key actions a user needs to take to fully set up and engage with their My Total Retirement dashboard — turning an open-ended screen into a guided, obvious first step.
Post-release testing was clear: half of users said they felt more confident knowing the first step to take on the dashboard, and engagement climbed across the board. Users specifically praised the simplicity and interactivity of the data visualizations and how clearly labeled and easy to find the primary CTAs (calls to action) were: link account, onboarding checklist, edit contributions.
Not everything landed. Some users felt overwhelmed by the volume of data visualizations and struggled to pull a clear takeaway from each widget. Several asked for a focused, synthesized summary of what it all meant. If I carried this forward, that's where I'd go next: pairing the guided checklist with a plain-language summary layer so the dashboard doesn't just show the data, but tells users what to make of it.