Bluevine

| Designing for SMBs

Bluevine is dedicated to building financial products tailored to small businesses. It’s product offerings currently include banking services, lending, and bill pay.

Role

During my time at Bluevine, I worked on both client-facing and internal products. I started in 2019 as the sole product designer working on the new banking product. Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to lead projects that impact both lending and banking products alongside a team of five other designers.

Here are some of the projects I’ve worked on:

Account Access

This platform-wide feature what would enable additional users to sign into one shared account. During user interviews with business owners, we were able to identify this as a bottleneck for managing day-to-day tasks. This project involved defining the roles and permissions and creating onboarding flows for additional users.

Accountant Dashboard

I partnered with another designer to create an MVP dashboard specifically geared towards an accountant experience. For small business owners, managing finances usually means bringing on an accountant in the form of an external accountant or accounting firm. The goal here was to help streamline the relationship between small businesses and accountants to help take the stress out of day-to-day business operations.

We launched this project in July of 2022.

Design Systems

When I first began working at Bluevine in 2019, there was only the beginnings of a component library in Sketch. Most of my initial work was focused around identifying gaps between design and Storybook components. However, as Bluevine’s product suite grew to include business checking and accountant dashboard, there was a need to expand the library and reevaluate existing components to optimize for the customer’s current and future needs. Since then, I’ve collaborated with other designers in migrating the design system from Sketch to Figma and implemented a platform-wide rebrand in Q2 of 2022.

We leveraged Google's Material Design System for our guiding principles and developed in Vuetify. Below are a few of the components that I worked on.

Onboarding Wizard

After ending our relationship with Bancorp in 2021, Bluevine’s new partner, Coastal Community Bank, had a few compliance requirements for our onboarding wizard that forced us to rethink the current experience. Including additional business owners, optimizing for specific entity types, and KYC document upload flow were just some of the improvements I worked on within the application process.

Sub-Accounts

In a survey, we found that small businesses frequently have a need for multiple business checking accounts. Sub-accounts would enable business owners to earmark money for monthly payroll or quarterly taxes.

Fraud Reporting

The goal of this project was to consolidate the fraud reporting process. Bluevine is obligated to provide unusual activity reports (UARs) to our banking partner on a monthly basis. Prior to my involvement, this process required the fraud team to manage, track, and consolidate data across multiple spreadsheets and sources.

Task Manager

Updated this feature to support new tasks for uploading incorporation documents during the onboarding wizard and from the client dashboard. Contextual information was added to each task the explain the steps needed to satisfy the task with links to support articles for more information.

Multi-factor Authentication

With the launch of our business checking account, Bluevine needed to provide additional security to meet industry standards. I lead the effort to implement this feature for our banking customers beginning with onboarding wizard and account setup.

Looking for more?

Feel free to reach me directly using the links below if you have any questions. Always happy to chat more about my process and deep dive into a specific case study of one of the above projects.