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.
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.
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:
We roped in the product and design teams, shared our research findings, and conducted a brainstorming workshop focused on one question: what’s the worst Blend Signing Room experience we could build? It was kind of a silly prompt, but it was effective in getting us to creatively challenge our assumptions and figure out what could actually work.