Redesigning Talview’s authentication

I rebuilt Talview’s sign-in: on SSO, login fell from 75 seconds to 35.

Context

Talview does hiring and proctoring, and every admin’s day starts at the same sign-in: the most-visited screen in the product, and the one nobody had designed. I was the only designer on it, working with the CTO, our product manager and a frontend engineer.

Signing in could take four and a half minutes

Nobody could say where that time went, or where people stalled: only the total was measured, so every fix was a guess. The screen showed one field and no sign of what came next, and a mistyped password had no way back.

Six things I could not change

None of them could be designed away, only made clearer.

• OTP latency

  The provider owns the wait, not us

• Many tenants

  One admin can belong to several organisations

• SSO policy

  The customer sets it, so the screen has to name it

• Security

  Every step has to hold, including recovery

• Existing system

  Built from components that already shipped

• Six weeks

  Restructure, not rewrite

Login is a funnel, not a screen

Measured, the interface took under ten seconds per step. The wait was OTP latency. So I left the screen alone and fixed the order.

One decision per step, in order

The old flow asked for email, code, organisation and method in no real order, offered backend settings as a choice, and dropped you into SSO unannounced. Now each step asks one thing, once the system knows enough to ask it, and names the next.

Before

1. Email One field, and no sign of what came next
2. OTP An external wait nobody owned. No resend, no explanation
3. Account “Account 2 (Without SSO)”. Backend settings, offered as a choice
4. Method A silent jump to SSO, with nothing to pick
5. • Forgot passwordDead end, call an admin
6. Product

After

1. Email Identifies the user, and names the step it leads to
2. Verification Owns the wait: says where the code went, and offers a resend
3. Account Lists organisations by name, and only when there is a choice to make
4. Method Names the customer’s policy on screen, with a fallback to pick
5. • Forgot passwordMagic link
   • Magic linkBack to sign-in
6. Product

Three screens did not exist

A first login by code, a way back from a wrong password, and a sign-up, on desktop and mobile. A typo meant calling an admin. Now it takes about 25 seconds. All 11 states ↗

Seventy-five seconds to thirty-five

On SSO, landing to login more than halved. On the code path, every stage runs six seconds faster; the wait for the code is still the longest step, and it belongs to the provider and to the person reading it, not to the screen.

Half the screen was doing nothing

The most-visited screen in the product was selling nothing. Nobody asked for a fix, so I built three layouts with AI and shipped one. Now 20–25% of sessions click into another product.

Measure first, then design

Looking back, measuring every step first mattered more than any screen I drew, and it’s where I’d start next time. What’s left is the minute the code takes, and that needs infrastructure, not another screen.

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