Situation
As a marketing team member at OptionsHouse, I owned strategies to build customer trust and a functional HTML prototype for usability testing. The application asked customers for sensitive information, including Social Security numbers. Comfort was not a visual flourish; it was the conversion constraint.
Constraint
The funnel had to feel like a brokerage, not a campaign landing page. Design, copy, and trust indicators needed to survive legal and technology review.
Decision
I treated the prototype as a product surface: polished UI, explicit trust cues, and a testable path the team could put in front of customers before engineering committed to the final application.
Outcome
The prototype became the tool for building the final application funnel. Customer applications improved leading up to OptionsHouse’s acquisition by E*TRADE in 2016.
What I would do again
Prototype in HTML when the question is “will someone type an SSN here,” not in a deck that cannot be clicked.
What I would change
I would instrument drop-off by field earlier so trust work had a numeric argument, not only a qualitative one.