Manulife HK
6 months
UX/UI design · Systems thinking · Process mapping · Design delivery
Stream UX/UI designer (me)
Design Lead
Client side
Design Head
Product Owner (PO)
Business Analyst (BA)
Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)
As the key UX/UI Designer for the eRecruitment stream, I owned the workflow design, working closely with the team to align the experience across the ecosystem.
Manulife's digital platform for recruiting and onboarding new insurance agents across Hong Kong.
The initial application form was already digitized, while the compliance-heavy stages that followed still relied on paper-based reviews, conditional approvals and fragmented handoffs. The challenge was to make this complexity clear for users without changing the required compliance process.
We mapped the underlying business logic with BA and SMEs, then translated it into an end-to-end digital workflow. The solution combined conditional forms, role-specific actions, cross-system status visibility, and separate lifecycles for application, eOffer, and eContract.
The workflow was delivered and refined through ongoing validation with the stakeholders and user focus groups. Instead of manually tracking approvals and chasing statuses across disconnected systems, users now follow a guided, role-specific process, seamlessly integrated into the broader ADO ecosystem experience. As a result, they are no longer responsible for making sense of the complexity behind it.
Manulife is a global financial services and insurance company operating across 25 markets worldwide.
Agent Digital Office (ADO) was Manulife Hong Kong’s large-scale transformation program for its agent ecosystem. It brought together five product pillars: Agent Website, Agency BI, eTraining, eRecruitment, and ePM. I worked as the key UX/UI Designer for the eRecruitment stream.
The program was delivered by a design organization distributed across Hong Kong, China, Malaysia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. Multiple design streams worked in parallel, coordinated by design leads and aligned with Manulife’s Design Head to create consistent product experiences and shared patterns across Manulife’s global products.
eRecruitment began its transformation before the wider ADO program. By the time our team joined, it had already digitized the initial application form and was running as a standalone product. So, my work focused on what came next: extending the workflow beyond the initial application and making eRecruitment feel like a connected part of the new ADO experience.
The initial application covered only the basics: the stage where a Recruiting Manager and an Applicant entered basic personal information and started the recruitment process. But submitting an application was only the first step.
Before an applicant could become a Manulife agent, they had to move through a complex process governed by detailed compliance requirements. A single answer in an applicant’s declaration could trigger a manual review, a request for supporting documentation, a justification form, or approval by another stakeholder.
The original paper documents made these dependencies difficult to follow. They contained long lists of conditions, cross-references between forms, and role-specific requirements. Some approval steps were also completed in a separate internal platform, Distribution Service Website (DSW). We did not own that system, but the workflow still needed to communicate its approval outcomes clearly inside eRecruitment.
Together, these constraints created a practical design challenge: not to compress the process into fewer steps, but to make a complex workflow understandable for every role. Not to remove mandatory controls, but to translate the logic behind them into clear actions, statuses, and next steps.
The paper forms showed what information was required, but not how the process actually worked end to end. That’s why, together with the Business Analyst, I worked with stakeholders and subject-matter experts to uncover the workflow behind the documents. We mapped the actions, decision points, edge cases, roles and dependencies. These maps became our shared reference point: a way to align business rules before translating them into interface behavior.
Even though all participants worked within the same process, each role entered it with a different goal and level of responsibility. Showing the same complex process to everyone would have created more confusion, so I tailored the experience to each role’s responsibilities.
Recruiting Managers needed to guide applicants through the full process and resolve exceptions. District Directors joined at the endorsement stage. Pre-agents only needed to act once internal approvals were complete and an offer or contract was ready for signing.
With that defined, I could turn the complex process into interfaces that revealed the right work at the right time.
Another important part of the work was reducing the effort required from users. The system surfaced the relevant form, supporting document, or review action automatically. This conditional interface behavior reduced users’ cognitive load and their responsibility for interpreting the process and compliance rules.
I also separated system-derived checks from decisions that required human judgment. Users could see what had already been identified from earlier answers and focus on the information or decisions that still required their attention.
Showing the right task was only part of the experience. Users also needed to understand where their application stood in the larger process. A single “In progress” label could not explain what was happening in a recruitment journey spanning several roles and systems.
So, I developed a status model that separated three connected lifecycles: Application itself, eOffer and eContract. The model also defined status visibility by role. This made it possible to represent progress accurately without exposing every internal rule or system dependency to every user.
This model was implemented as the foundation for the system architecture.
In a project like this, validation could not happen only at the end. It needed to be continuous and multidimensional.
From a process and compliance perspective, we worked with stakeholders throughout each iteration to validate workflow logic, business rules, dependencies, and edge cases. In parallel, the Product Owner validated the experience with users through focus groups. We incorporated their feedback, refining interactions and flow behavior along the way.
I also validated the design with our Design Lead to stay aligned with the other ADO product pillars, and with Manulife’s Design Head to ensure the experience followed shared patterns across the company’s global products.
The result was a validated, delivered workflow that supported the end-to-end journey of recruiting and onboarding new agents. Instead of interpreting compliance rules and tracking approvals themselves, users now move through a guided, role-specific process — digitized, status-visible, and connected to the wider ADO portal. What once demanded constant manual interpretation now runs on its own logic, leaving users free to focus on decisions instead of managing the process behind them.
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