Redesigning Talview’s authentication

Landing to login fell from 75 seconds to 35. I rebuilt the flow, the screens, and the three that were missing.

Context

Talview does hiring and proctoring: a role goes out, applications come back, the person testing is proved to be the candidate, and a live round is watched as it runs. Every one of those days starts in the same place. The admin sign-in is the most-visited screen in the product.

Everything behind that screen had been designed. The screen itself had not.

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.

4.5 min

to sign in

0

ways back from a typo

0 of 5

steps measured

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 stopped fixing the screen and started fixing the order.

The steps were never the problem

Nothing told you where you were. It dropped you into SSO unannounced, and a wrong password was a dead end. Now every step 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. A typo meant calling an admin. Now it takes about 25 seconds.

1. 01 OTP login
2. 02 Forgot password
3. 03 Sign up

Eight more states ship in the same layout. See all 11 states in the live demo ↗

Seventy-five seconds to thirty-five

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.

Measuring beat redesigning

Nothing I did made OTP delivery faster. What moved the number was measuring every step first, and fixing the order second. Three things are still wrong.

• OTP latency

  Still over a minute. Infrastructure, not interface.

• Shifting chrome

  The back arrow and tabs were meant to hold their place. They move.

• Mobile sign-up

  The help button sits on top of the legal note.

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