[ Case study ]
Dow Jones: Financial Advisor Onboarding
The onboarding and ranking journey for Barron's financial-advisor experience, part of Dow Jones. Barron's recognises top advisors through its rankings, so the flow had to carry very different people through one coherent path: established advisors who are already core or ranked, and applicants who are not yet ranked. I mapped how all three move through a single, legible onboarding, reconciling the paths rather than splitting them into separate journeys.
- Client
- Dow Jones - Barron's
- Role
- Lead UX Architect
- Year
- 2023
- Disciplines
- Enterprise UX, User Flows, Onboarding, Information Architecture
3
Applicant paths reconciled: core, ranked, unranked
1
Unified onboarding flow
[ Information architecture ]
Entry & identity
- Sign in
- Verification
Core / ranked path
- Recognition
- Fast track
Unranked path
- Qualification
- Guided steps
Complete
- Profile created
Confidentiality notice
This work spans active platform strategy, shared AI capabilities, and multiple product surfaces. To respect that, this case study stays intentionally high-level, focusing on the cross-brand design problem, platform principles, and reusable outcomes rather than brand-specific implementation details.
Barron's financial-advisor experience, part of Dow Jones, had to onboard very different people through one coherent journey: established advisors who are already core or ranked, and applicants who are not yet ranked. I mapped the proposed onboarding flow that reconciles those paths into a single, legible experience.
The challenge
Onboarding is where trust is won or lost for a financial-advisor product. The flow had to handle the established advisor who expects recognition, and the applicant who must be guided through qualification, without forcing either down the wrong path.
- Core and ranked advisors needed a fast, recognition-first path
- Unranked applicants needed a guided qualification journey
- Every decision point, screen, and data state had to be explicit for engineering
[ Protected layer ]
The full case study is available on request.
High-fidelity screens, information architecture and the detailed process for this enterprise project are shared under NDA. Enter the access password, or request access and I will share the full walkthrough.