Onboarding 4,500 HSBC Canada Employees in a Single Day

Impact

Designed the intranet onboarding experience for RBC's largest-ever single-day employee integration (4,500 hires), driving over half of new employees to engage with the onboarding hub within week one.

My Role

Research & Design Lead · QA Analyst · Led a cross-functional team of 9 (4 UX designers, 2 UX researchers, 2 Product Owners, 2 Developers)

Team

4 UX Designers · 2 UX Researchers · 2 Product Owners · 2 Developers · 2 QA Analysts

Tools

Mural · Figma · Google Analytics

Timeline

5 months

The Problem

RBC's acquisition of HSBC Canada meant 4,500 employees would onboard on the same day — the largest single cohort in company history. This was a high-visibility integration in a regulated financial environment, with a fixed timeline and no room for a poor new-hire experience.

The existing onboarding process was fragmented across multiple intranet sites. New employees had no single entry point, no clear support path, and no way to find what they needed quickly. The risk was concrete: a spike in HR and IT support calls, and a degraded first impression for thousands of incoming employees during a highly visible acquisition.

Problem statement: With 4,500 new employees joining on the same day, the current onboarding process risked significant support-call volume and decreased new-employee satisfaction.

Objectives:

Improve the onboarding process for both HSBC and RBC new employees

Make new employees feel welcome and supported

Provide an all-in-one entry point to all onboarding materials

What I Did

1. Ran two rounds of research with new hires across departments.
Research was conducted with employees who had joined within the previous three weeks at the time of each round, drawn from different departments to ensure a range of feedback. Interviews surfaced three core failures:

  • No single source of onboarding information

  • Scattered sites made information difficult to locate

  • Unclear support contacts for HR or technical issues

New employees wanted resources that would help them get on board faster and more smoothly.

2. Led ideation and wireframe testing on two competing solutions.
From the interview findings, I facilitated collaborative ideation sessions and the team developed two products:

  • Product 1: A welcoming pop-up on the intranet home page — the first thing new employees see when they open their browser

  • Product 2: A new onboarding page in the HR portal, providing resources and tips

Wireframe testing surfaced a real trade-off. The pop-up raised concerns about being intrusive, blocking the home page, and leaving users unsure where to find the links after closing. The onboarding page was too short, low-readability, not engaging, and needed more clickable links to the right resources.

Instead of picking one, I led the team to iterate both.

3. Ran task-based usability testing on the final designs.
For the pop-up, we added a second version for users viewing it 2+ times, changed the wording to reduce text, added a "never see pop-up again" option, and allowed users to save the onboarding resource link to their home page quick links.

For the onboarding page, we polished the content, added resource links and FAQs, and updated the designs with more icons and graphics.

Usability testing findings:

  • Pop-up: No interaction issues. Users did not engage with the text under the header, did not read before checking the box and closing, and did not realize the onboarding link had been saved to their quick links. Positive feedback on the design — simple, felt welcomed.

  • Onboarding page: Still too much text and difficult to skim. FAQs lacked specific issues encountered. The welcome banner text was heavy and did not articulate what the page was about.

4. Led communications and QA throughout.
I led communications with Product Owners, developers, and other designers throughout the project, and conducted QA testing on the final build.

Results

  • 2,973 employees engaged with the onboarding pop-up — 76% of the 3,906 users tracked during the measured period.

  • 4,054 visits to the new onboarding page on the HR portal, driven directly from the pop-up link.

  • 19,475 total clicks across onboarding resources.

  • Launched to the full incoming cohort of 4,500 HSBC Canada employees, following RBC's acquisition of HSBC Canada.

    Metrics tracked in Google Analytics across a two-week window (Mar 22 – Apr 5, 2024). Specific figures generalized per RBC confidentiality guidelines.

Reflection

The hardest part wasn't the design — it was balancing business needs against user needs under budget and timeline constraints. This was a high-visibility integration on a fixed date, and the business needed a solution that would reduce support load without disrupting the home page experience. Users needed a calm, skimmable, non-intrusive welcome. Those two pressures pulled in opposite directions.

Leading a 9-person cross-functional team through that trade-off was the core of the work. I built the research and design plans, facilitated design workshops, led team research analysis collaboratively, and owned communications with Product Owners, developers, and designers throughout. The project gave me well-rounded ownership across research, design, testing, UX copy, and QA — and confirmed that my strongest contribution is leading cross-functional teams through ambiguous, high-stakes problems.

[All the information presented has been reviewed with the company before sharing]

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