From Pages to Possibilities​
A user design case study on the website Project Gutenberg
SME Digital Customer Onboarding
Images and UI/UX artifacts are protected by non-disclosure agreements; conversations regarding these systems are always welcome .Conceptual imagery within this portfolio includes AI-generated assets.*
Overview
Virtusa and Thought Machine publicly announced an SME Customer Onboarding Platform in August 2023, built to help financial institutions make onboarding for small businesses faster and more digital. My work centered on the actual onboarding journey — the screens, flows, and decisions a small-business owner has to get through before their account exists.
The Challenge
_edit.png)
Opening a business banking relationship asks for a lot more than opening a personal account: company information, ownership structure, authorized signatories, addresses, tax details, supporting documents. When that process feels like one endless form, people don't push through it — they abandon it and go back to a branch or a relationship manager, which is exactly the outcome a digital onboarding platform is supposed to prevent.
My Role
_edited_j.jpg)
I worked across requirements, design, and frontend implementation, alongside a Product Manager, banking-savvy Business Analysts, fellow UI/UX designers, frontend and backend engineers, integration engineers, QA, and representatives from the banking platform side.
My starting point was breaking one very large process into stages that actually made sense on their own: **Business Details, Registered Address, Owners and Directors, Authorized Signatories, Documents, Review and Submission** — mapped out in Figma and FigJam before a single high-fidelity screen existed.
Designing for Real Ownership Structures
Take a small restaurant applying for a business account, where one director owns 70% and another owns 30%. Rather than asking someone to fill in ownership details in a long, context-free form, I designed a repeatable ownership section — add a person, enter their percentage, and immediately see whether the ownership adds up and the section is actually complete.
Designing for the Fact That Nobody Finishes This in One Sitting
SME onboarding rarely happens in a single session — documents aren't always ready, signatories aren't always available. So I designed around that reality directly: autosave feedback, **Save and Continue Later**, clear completed-section indicators, and messaging that always told the user what was still missing. For document upload specifically, I designed distinct states for uploading, uploaded, invalid format, file too large, and upload failed — so a stalled upload never looked like a broken page.
Designing for When Things Don't Come Back Clean
I worked closely with engineering on what should happen when backend checks didn't return a clean result — for example, when a company-verification service couldn't confirm a registration number. Instead of the flow simply stopping, I designed a path forward: review what was entered, retry, or move into manual review where that made sense. Getting this right meant going through REST API responses and JSON with engineering directly, so the design accounted for the error states that could actually occur — not just the ones that were convenient to design for.
From Design to Implementation
I built responsive designs in Figma using reusable components for inputs, dropdowns, address sections, document upload, progress indicators, and validation — with some earlier references carried over from Adobe XD. I used Chrome DevTools during implementation review to check responsive behavior, form validation, and API-driven states, with Jira tracking stories and defects, Confluence holding workflow decisions, and Zeplin handling handoff. Accessibility was built in throughout: keyboard movement, form labels, error placement, visible focus states, and never relying on color alone to communicate a problem.
Outcome
The final experience turned one intimidating banking application into a series of smaller, understandable tasks — and because validation rules, error states, and responsive behavior were documented up front, it also cut down on the back-and-forth design-development discussions that usually eat into a project like this.
What mattered most to me wasn't making the onboarding screens look modern. It was making sure a business owner always knew what the bank needed, why it was needed, what they'd already completed, and exactly what came next.
