Redesigning the Terms of Engagement signing flow for experts

Dialectica is an information services firm that connects investment and strategy professionals with subject-matter experts for private consultations. These specialized insights help clients conduct primary research to make more informed business decisions.

Before experts could participate in any consultation, they needed to sign the Terms of Engagement (ToE) — a necessary legal step. Experts were introduced to this flow via email. The existing experience was a single, long page that tried to do everything at once, causing experts to abandon the process before signing.

Terms of Engagement redesigned interface

Role

Senior Product Designer
Sole designer on the project

Responsibilities

UX/UI Design
Design system (from scratch)
Design QA

Constraints

Built with MUI components
Had to customize MUI's default UI

The problem

Experts were abandoning the signing flow

The ToE signing flow was the gateway to consultations — if experts didn't complete it, they couldn't participate in calls with clients. The old flow presented everything on a single, dense page: personal details, experience history, and the legal terms all at once. Experts would land on this page from an email link, feel overwhelmed, and leave before signing.

This directly impacted the business: fewer signed ToEs meant fewer available experts, which meant fewer consultation calls between our clients and experts.

What I changed

Simplifying the flow and focusing on accuracy

Rather than redesigning the page cosmetically, I restructured the entire flow around two principles: reduce overwhelm and capture accurate expert information to manage the risk of misrepresentation.

Broke "Getting started" into 3–4 sub-steps

Instead of one long page, the onboarding was split into distinct steps so experts could see where they were and what was left. Each step had a clear purpose, reducing cognitive load.

Current experience gets its own dedicated space

The expert's current position is now front and centre with its own section. Experts must confirm its accuracy — or update it — before they can proceed. This was a deliberate gating decision to manage the risk of expert misrepresentation.

Experts without confirmed experience cannot proceed

If an expert doesn't have current experience on file, or hasn't confirmed it, the flow blocks them from moving forward. This prioritised data accuracy over pushing people through faster.

Added a "Past experiences" section

This wasn't available before. Experts can now see and verify their full employment history, which gives Dialectica a richer, more trustworthy profile to present to clients.

Before & after

From one dense page to a stepped, focused flow

The old "Getting started" page crammed personal details, experience, and legal terms into a single scroll. The redesign breaks this into clear steps with a sidebar navigation, giving each section room to breathe.

Challenge

Working with MUI and making it our own

The engineering team used Material UI (MUI) as the component library. This meant I had to design within MUI's constraints while pushing its default look into something that felt like Dialectica's product — not a generic Material Design app. I created a small design system from scratch to bridge the gap between what MUI offered out of the box and the visual quality I was after.

This also made Design QA more difficult. MUI components have opinionated default styles and spacing, so every detail had to be checked against the design to make sure nothing reverted to defaults during development.

Key moments

Decisions that shaped the project

Made a decision

Blocking experts who haven't confirmed their current role

This was a deliberate trade-off. Gating the flow on experience confirmation slowed some experts down, but it ensured Dialectica could present accurate profiles to clients — protecting both the expert's reputation and the platform's credibility.

Made a change

Restructuring from one page into sub-steps

The original flow tried to do everything at once. Breaking "Getting started" into distinct sub-steps was a design concept change to reduce overwhelm — giving experts a sense of progress rather than a wall of fields to fill.