Company:
Ribbon
Duration:
2023 (3 months)
Team:
Overview
The problem: Families navigating inheritance faced complex, time-consuming bureaucratic hurdles, while Ribbon’s early-stage MVP relied on a passive Typeform waitlist that failed to capture user intent or demonstrate product value.
The goal: Enable customers to initiate an inheritance request in ≤2 minutes while establishing trust through clear guidance during emotionally sensitive financial transactions.
Success Metrics: 250+ accounts created during private beta (validating market demand, and 100% of users completed onboarding in <2 minutes.
Deliverables:
Customer journey map aligning stakeholders on critical pain points
High-conversion UI flow balancing legal compliance with emotional sensitivity
Challenge
Inheriting financial assets involves navigating grief, legal complexity, and bureaucratic friction simultaneously.
Our team faced dual constraints: a 3-week build timeline requiring a pre-built design system, working alongside a cross-functional team needing to validate assumptions without existing market benchmarks.
The core tension lay in simplifying a legally rigorous process without sacrificing user trust or regulatory compliance.
Discovery and Iteration
Through collaborative workshops with co-founders, we identified three key user needs: clarity (understanding requirements), confidence (trusting the platform with sensitive data), and control (perceived progress).
I rapidly prototyped multiple approaches to information hierarchy, testing how to:
Chunk complex questions into digestible steps
Embed contextual help without overwhelming users
Signal security through microcopy and visual cues
Legal documentation uploads emerged as a critical anxiety point, prompting us to redesign file handling as a “document checklist” with real-time validation.
Solution and Impact
The final flow reduced cognitive load through:
Progressive disclosure of information (e.g., dynamic account type filtering)
Emotional scaffolding via empathetic microcopy (“We’ll handle this together”)
Trust-building touchpoints like a transparent process tracker
The Stripe integration not only enabled payments but served as a psychological “seal of approval” for financial security. In private beta, the design achieved 0% drop-off during document uploads – a critical validation of our trust-building approach – while maintaining full legal compliance
