Sun Life is one of the largest providers of employee and government benefits, serving more than 50 million members. Most of those people get their benefits through their employer; they serve over 12,000 employers in the U.S.
Employers - specifically HR administrators - deal with a lot of complexity to provide their employees with a benefits plan. Switching to a new insurer is a monumental amount of work - typically months of paperwork, phone calls, spreadsheets, coversations and signatures. If this isn't completed on time it can jeopardize the employee experience when benefits “go live" and this often happens because administrators made mistakes or were missing deadlines. This onboarding process also requires so many resource in Sun Life that it took years before many accounts even became profitable. We needed to dramatically streamline the onboarding process for both the clients and our internal staff to improve out bottom line and the client experience.
In 2021 we studied the full service model for the employer journey and noticed many points where frustrations ran high and errors were introduced. A year later we launched Onboard- a new platform that walks new employers through the whole process, collects all the information and provides the latest status on each component. Sun Life Onboard was the first major piece to our transformation of the client experience.
I lead design strategy and directed design efforts for its first 12 months until the initial release. I was in early discussions around timing, activities, approach, and staffing. I formed a detailed design plan that included research, concepting, brainstorming, user validation and an iterative release. Though I did some of the early sketching and interaction designs, I had amazing help from a senior UX designer who did most of the detailed design work.
This project began with a methodical audit of the steps, tools, people and time that went into onboarding a typical new client. This was done by the business transformation team and it informed early discussions on how we could transform the experience to be more efficient and convenient. We discussed a few new models that included a combination of new digital tooling, phone calls, training, emails and client services. We also dug deep into the places where the process broke down, fell behind or caused a lot of errors - and discussed ways that digital could help. We started to grasp the big picture of the digital process and how we might shepherd a client through it all and do it in a way that was welcoming, guided and flexible.
One challenge with the interaction design was finding a balance between structure and flexibility. Some of our designs were very linear, but that meant users couldnt complete steps in a way that might work better for their work style. We narrowed down the possible interaction models to one that offered both - a clear path towards completion with some flexibility within 5-6 major phases of work.
Our sketches turned into some detailed wireframes. We identified a few core interactions such as a welcome flow, a 'pizza tracker', tasks, statuses and educational content. Rather than try to design all the steps, we focused on a few key 'magic moments' when we really needed the digital experience to be successful. We prototyped these moments, paid careful attention to every details and tested them with some new and experience benefit administrators.
While engineering began work on the initial release using the wireframes, we began the final phase of work - the final visual design and copywriting. Because this was the first new external platform in about ten years, we were treading some very new territory. Sun Life had no design system at the time so my visual design had to develop his own look based the brand guidelines (which were very focused on marketing collateral).
The final designs were a great evolution of the wires and interpretation of the brand. Like the name for the platform, Onboard, the UI was very clean and straightforward. Colors were deliberate and motivated always and the density of the pages worked well even when there was a lot of text on the page. Our developers were also thrilled with the visuals because they were very close to the original layouts in the wireframes.
Sun Life Onboard was initially released in April 2021 to a limited set of brokers and employers. We carefully monitored these users and learned how we could improve the experience for a broader release later that fall for our busy season. We continued to add features to support more employer groups and did a broader release in the spring of 2022 to all employers with 2000 employees or less.
Today 95% of employers today choose to use Onboard for their onboarding experience. Out of those employers - 77% rate the experience as "easy" compare to only 50% using the more manual method.
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