Blend

Transparency to Consumer Lending



Blend's mission is to bring simplicity and transparency to consumer lending.

As a Product Design intern at Blend, I worked on two primary projects to help bring clarity to the consumer lending space. The first was an internal product that visualizes complex compliance topics for new hires, and the second was a new dashboard for the company’s objectives.





01

Interactive onboarding product



This project is a new-hire onboarding product I made with the Organization Effectiveness team to introduce complex compliance topics during first week orientation. To begin, I interviewed employees about their current understanding related to these topics, and addressed those areas in an engaging and playful interactive tool that could be easily shared.

Employees at Blend progressed at their own pace, with the option to explore specific areas of the process that were more confusing.

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To assist the org effectiveness team with onboarding after I transitioned off the project, I created a Sketch-based illustration library for them to use to generate visual elements for the different chapters of the onboarding experience. Included over 8 unique illustrations for splash images, headers and footers.


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All illustrations were drawn in Sketch.





Making sense of loan origination



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Participatory journey map of the loan origination process I created with employees and former loan officers at Blend. Each color represents a different perspective. ex: orange = the borrower’s journey, pink = Blend’s influence, blue = disclosures, and so on





02

OKR dashboard




The goal on this project was to redesign the company’s OKR dashboard to help align the company toward their quarterly goals. The final result was a multi-touchpoint service initiative that informed employees why Blend chose these specific product goals, and to provide metrics that had both meaning and direction.



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The refreshed OKR dashboard gives priority and trajectory to current goals, instead of a single data point.


This dashboard needed to be easy to update regularly, but also needed some visual treatment that was beyond the capabilities of Google Slides or Tableau, the current software Blend was using to visualize their OKRs.



Wireframes

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The above images are wireframes I created to test different ways of showing metrics. The left column is what the visualization will look like, the right column is the background image used for the Tableau dashboard.



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03

Final thoughts



Blend was accommodating with my own curiosities during my internship. From working on visualizations with the data team one day, to an animated prototype demo for a client onsite the next, I was thrown into a fast-paced environment that honed my ability to make connections from all faces of the company. My biggest take away was developing an understanding of how to listen to the needs of the company, and being okay with not knowing the solution. The lending industry is extremely ingrained in archaic processes, and learning about it was a huge undertaking— designing for it even more so.