Overview

TL;DR

Blend is a B2B2C financial technology company that builds mortgage and consumer banking software for financial institutions (such as banks and credit unions) and their members. 🏦
We designed and developed Blend Signing Room, a remote online notarization platform, from 0 to 1. Upon its release, we saw strong adoption across lenders and grew to 3,000 monthly notarizations. 🧑‍💻

Background

Context

The closing appointment is the final step of the home buying process and the first step of home ownership. Traditionally, these appointments occur in person with the homebuyer ink signing documents in presence of a notary, but there has been an increased demand for hybrid closing appointments (where the buyer electronically signs a few documents ahead of time and ink signs the rest with a notary) and remote online notarization (RON) appointments, the latter especially seeing a spike due to COVID-19.

During the summer of 2020, the demand for RON appointments led us to prioritize building our own online signing room to deliver a consistent end to end experience for the signer and notary.

My role and timeframe

As the lead designer, I worked with one product manager, two operations managers, one legal counsel, and a team of engineers for over a year to bring Blend Signing Room (BSR) from concept to release.

Approach

Initial research

While there are several people involved in a closing appointment, the notary ****plays a key role in ensuring that the notarization is completed according to the law. To better understand what a notary does and how they work, we analyzed RON products that are already on the market and interviewed three notaries who have forty years of combined experience. Our competitor analysis and interviews kept highlighting the following points:

Most signers use laptops, but some have asked to use their phones.
It’s easy for a notary to be in control of an in-person notarization, but they want to still feel in control of an online notarization. This would be in ways like being aware of what a signer is doing, what they are signing, and being able to see their faces at all times.