**Turning a chaotic onboarding process into a single, seamless experience**

New hires at Tata Consulting Services faced a fragmented, paper-heavy onboarding journey with no visibility, no self-service, and no clear path from offer letter to first day. I designed OnboardIT — an end-to-end platform to fix that.

About the Company

Tata Consultancy Services is one of the world's largest IT services companies — onboarding thousands of new employees every year across multiple geographies. Despite that scale, the onboarding experience was almost entirely manual: offer letters, document submissions, inductions, and location assignments were handled through a patchwork of emails, physical paperwork, and disconnected internal portals.

New hires — particularly fresh graduates joining for the first time — had little visibility into where they stood, what was needed from them, or who to contact when things stalled. The result was anxiety, delays, and a poor first impression of the company they'd just committed to.

Context

The business need

TCS needed a proof-of-concept for a centralized digital onboarding platform that could handle registration, document collection, training assignments, and location joining — reducing manual overhead and improving the new hire experience at scale.

My involvement

I owned the project end-to-end — from conducting user research and synthesising insights to defining the information architecture, creating wireframes, building a design system, and delivering a high-fidelity interactive prototype in Adobe XD.

The Problem

Friction points making day one harder than it needed to be

Through structured and semi-structured interviews with new joiners and internal HR stakeholders, I mapped the key failure points across the onboarding journey. The issues weren't isolated — they were systemic.

01.

Manual, paper-heavy document collection

Submitting degrees, certificates, and ID documents required physical copies or fragmented email chains — error-prone, slow, and impossible to track once submitted.

02.

No centralised task or deadline management

New hires were expected to complete mandatory courses, inductions, and form submissions — but had no single place to see what was outstanding, overdue, or done.

03.

No visibility into application status

New hires had no way to track where they were in the process. Every update required chasing an HR contact, creating anxiety and flooding internal teams with avoidable queries.

04.

Disconnected communication

Updates, reminders, and policy information arrived via email, WhatsApp, and verbal instruction — with no single source of truth for the new hire to return to.

05.

Unclear organisation context for new joiners

Fresher hires in particular lacked easy access to policies, point-of-contact details, and location information — leaving them underprepared for their first day.

the process

Research-led.
Sprint-constrained.
Prototype-ready.

With only two weeks to deliver a working prototype, every design decision had to be intentional. I followed a tight four-phase process — anchoring design choices in research rather than assumption at every stage.

Research

I ran structured and semi-structured interviews with two key user groups: fresh graduate hires and lateral joiners, as well as internal HR administrators. I mapped user demographics, documented existing workflows, and identified where the current process broke down for each group. From this, I established measurable user goals and formed a clear design hypothesis.
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Key finding: Freshers and lateral hires had fundamentally different mental models of onboarding — requiring the platform to serve both without overwhelming either.

Empathise

I synthesised interview data into two distinct user personas — one for fresh graduate hires, one for experienced lateral joiners — and built detailed user journey maps for each. These maps exposed the emotional low points in the onboarding experience: the uncertainty after submitting documents, the confusion around joining logistics, and the frustration of chasing updates through informal channels.
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Design implicationThe journey map made it clear that reducing anxiety — not just reducing steps — was a core design goal. Visibility and reassurance were as important as functionality.

Innovate

With research synthesised, I defined the feature set and designed the information architecture — mapping out how content and tasks would be organised across the application. I compared proposed task flows against the existing process to identify exactly where the new design would reduce friction. Low-fidelity wireframes followed, giving a fast structural overview before visual decisions were made.
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Principle: Address the most anxiety-inducing moments first — status visibility and document submission — before designing supplementary features.

Design

I built a visual language and component library in Adobe Illustrator before moving into high-fidelity screens in Adobe XD. The style guide ensured consistency across all six feature areas. Screens were then linked into a fully interactive prototype — covering the complete onboarding journey from home screen through document submission and notification management.
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Outcome: A clickable, stakeholder-ready prototype delivered within the two-week sprint — covering all five problem areas identified in research.

The solution

Six features. One coherent journey.

Each feature was mapped directly to a pain point uncovered in research — nothing was designed speculatively.
Together, they cover the full arc of the onboarding experience.

Home Screen

A personalised dashboard giving new hires an at-a-glance view of their onboarding status, outstanding tasks, and upcoming milestones — replacing the uncertainty of email-based updates with a clear, structured overview.

Application Timeline

A chronological view of every action taken across the onboarding process — by the hire and by HR stakeholders. Designed to eliminate the need to chase updates and give new hires confidence that things are moving.

User Profile

A centralised hub for organisation policies, point-of-contact details, and location joining information — ensuring new hires always knew where to look, rather than digging through email threads.

Document Locker

A mobile-first document scanner and upload tool — letting users capture and submit degrees, certificates, and ID documents directly from their phone. Replaced physical submissions and fragmented email attachments entirely.

Employee Application Form

A structured multi-step form for submitting personal and professional details required during onboarding — broken into logical sections to reduce cognitive load and minimise errors at submission.

Notification Centre

A unified feed for all onboarding updates and reminders — with the ability to set personal reminders for pending actions. Replaced the fragmented mix of emails and informal messages with a single, reliable channel.

The IMPACT

A proof of concept that addressed every core failure

Full Journey Coverage

The prototype covered the entire onboarding arc — from offer letter receipt to base location joining — for the first time in a single digital experience.

Delivered in 2 Weeks

Research, IA, visual design, and a fully interactive high-fidelity prototype — all completed within a two-week sprint, ready for stakeholder presentation.

Eliminated Paper Dependency

Document scanning and digital submission replaced physical paperwork, reducing manual processing overhead for HR teams and giving new hires instant confirmation.

Anxiety Reduction by Design

The Application Timeline and Notification Centre directly addressed the emotional low points identified in research — replacing uncertainty with visibility and reassurance.

Reflection

What a two-week sprint teaches you about prioritisation

OnboardIT was my first experience designing under genuine sprint pressure — and it reshaped how I think about scoping. The temptation in a project like this is to solve everything. The discipline is knowing which problems, if solved well, make the rest feel smaller. In this case, that meant anchoring on visibility and document submission before anything else.

Working across two distinct user personas also sharpened my thinking about designing for range — building a single experience that felt appropriately tailored to both a nervous first-time joiner and a confident lateral hire, without bifurcating the product.

Turning a chaotic onboarding process into a single, seamless experience

Client:

Tata Consulting Services

Category:

User Research, UI Design

Tools:

Adobe Suite, Miro