From One Form to a Guided Sequence: Redesigning SaaS Telephony Compliance

Context

The Compliance Center is where JustCall businesses register with telecom carriers — Business Profile verification, A2P 10DLC for SMS, Caller ID (CNAM), and Toll-Free Number registration — the paperwork every SaaS telephony product has to get right before a single message or call can legally go out under a business’s name.

As Product Designer II on JustCall’s revamp, I owned the redesign end-to-end: research into where the existing flow broke down, a competitive teardown of how other platforms handled the same compliance requirements, and the complete UI across all four registration types.

The Problem

The existing Business Profile form was the front door to every compliance in the product — and it was in bad shape, in both UX and UI.

• A single 15+ field form crammed every requirement onto one screen, with no way to save a draft and return later
• Labels borrowed backend language — “Contact Information” instead of “Business Point of Contact” — leaving users unsure what was actually being asked
• SMS, Caller ID and Toll-Free registration could each be started independently, so applications piled up in states nobody understood
• Tooltips and cost breakdowns were inconsistent or missing, so businesses had no idea what a registration would cost or why it mattered
• There was no way to review a submitted application, and a failed Business Profile silently broke every registration attached to it
• The trust score attached to 10DLC approval had no explanation, undermining confidence in the number meant to build it

The defining insight: this wasn’t four separate forms with a UI problem. It was one trust relationship — the Business Profile — wearing four different disguises.

Behavioral Insight

Studying how carriers actually evaluate compliance, and where businesses got stuck in the existing flow, surfaced three consistent patterns:

1. Compliance is sequential, not parallel. Carriers verify a business’s identity once — the Business Profile — before anything downstream (SMS, Caller ID, Toll-Free) can be trusted. Treating the four registrations as independent options let users start, and fail, things that were never going to succeed without the profile first.
2. A long form isn’t hard because of its length — it’s hard because of its shape. The same fifteen-odd fields didn’t need to shrink; they needed structure. Breaking them into logical steps changed how the form felt to complete without changing the work it asked for.
3. Compliance rules are regional, not universal. A2P 10DLC applies only to US carriers; CNAM and Toll-Free eligibility vary by country. Any flow that didn’t gate on geography would let businesses submit applications guaranteed to fail.

The existing product asked businesses to fill out forms. It needed to walk them through a sequence.

Design Hypothesis

If we sequence every compliance registration around a single verified Business Profile, break that profile itself into digestible steps, and make every gate, cost and failure state explicit, then businesses complete compliance correctly the first time — instead of bouncing between four confusing, disconnected forms.

This meant a deliberate shift in the design language:

The Approach: Designing the Compliance Sequence

The redesign was structured around the order a business actually has to move through:

1. Register the Business Profile — the single source of truth every other compliance depends on
2. Get gated, not blocked — SMS, CNAM and Toll-Free stay visible but disabled, with tooltips explaining exactly what unlocks them
3. Get pushed at the right moment — once the Business Profile succeeds, a prompt offers 10DLC registration immediately, while intent is highest
4. See a component system, not one-off screens — every compliance type shares the same card, status and cost-summary components
5. Fail safely — a failed Business Profile surfaces a page banner and a blocking modal everywhere it has downstream impact
6. Scale across geography — businesses register multiple profiles per country, each populating only the compliances that country supports

Key Design Decisions

Breaking the Business Profile into three logical steps. The same fifteen fields — organisation details, business classification, point of contact — were restructured into a stepper: General Information, Business Information, and Point of Contact. Nothing about the workload changed; what changed was that no single screen ever felt like the whole form.

Gating, not blocking — every other compliance stays visible, just disabled. SMS Compliance, Caller ID (CNAM), and Toll-Free Registration all remain on the Compliance Center as soon as a business logs in — just disabled, with a tooltip explaining that the Business Profile has to be submitted first. Once it’s approved, every card unlocks in place. Users always see the full picture of what’s coming, never a dead end.

Multi-campaign SMS registration with a real cost summary. 10DLC use cases can span multiple campaigns per business, so SMS Compliance became an accordion — expand, collapse, and submit several campaigns in one pass — with a running cost summary (brand registration, per-campaign fee, monthly messaging fee) visible before submit, not discovered on a bill.

The same shape, reused for Caller ID and Toll-Free. Once the campaign pattern worked for SMS, Caller ID (CNAM) and Toll-Free Number registration were built to match it — same list-plus-detail layout, same status vocabulary (Approved, In Review, Failed), same actions. A business that had registered one compliance already knew how to register the next.

Designing for the failure, not just the happy path. A rejected Business Profile doesn’t just fail quietly — it fails every compliance downstream of it. The redesign surfaces this with a persistent page banner (“Resubmit Business Profile”) and a blocking modal on any dependent action, both routing straight to the resubmission form instead of leaving the business to guess what broke.

Built for multiple businesses, not just one. Larger accounts operate in more than one country, and compliance requirements are country-specific — SMS Compliance only applies in the US, for instance. The Business Profile list supports registering several profiles, each carrying its own country, status, and downstream compliance set, so the system scales with the business instead of assuming it operates in only one place.

Impact

Post-launch indicators:

The redesign didn't make compliance simpler — it made the order of operations visible.

Learnings

• Sequencing beats parallelism when trust has to be earned once. Gating four compliances behind one verified profile turned confusion into a predictable order.
• A long form isn’t the enemy — an undifferentiated one is. Breaking fifteen fields into three steps changed nothing about the work and everything about how it felt.
• Failure states deserve as much design attention as success states. A rejected Business Profile has to say exactly what broke and exactly how to fix it, everywhere it has consequences.
• Shared components compound. Once SMS Compliance’s card-and-status pattern existed, Caller ID and Toll-Free Number were configuration, not new design.
• Compliance is regional — design the data model for that from day one. Multi-country business profiles were easier to add early than to retrofit once a single-profile assumption was everywhere.