Business Essentials
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As a lead UX designer, I helped the team launch U.S. Bank’s Business Essentials, a digital solution for small businesses that streamlines checking, payments, and POS (Point Of Sale) tools into one experience. The redesign led to 92% improved navigation scores and 60% faster onboarding, helping businesses get set up faster and with less friction.
Platform
Time
Problem
Small Business Owners (SBOs) often face major challenges managing their finances due to siloed tools. With checking, payment processing, and other banking functions scattered across different platforms, they struggle to get a unified view of cash flow. According to internal research,70% of SBOs found the experience fragmented and difficult to use, and over 60% reported friction in onboarding due to time-consuming and unclear access flows.
Solution
To address these challenges, we designed a unified banking experience that bundles essential tools — like business checking, payment processing, and point-of-sale systems — into one cohesive platform. As a lead UX designer, I focused on simplifying onboarding and connecting financial touchpoints in a seamless flow. The new design helps SBOs track money movement more clearly, manage accounts with confidence, and spend less time setting up. The result: faster access to funds and fewer barriers to growth.
From exploration to integration: Designing the shop, apply, and onboarding experience
The prototype represents the initial creation of the Business Essentials product, designed from the ground up to meet the needs of SBOs. Each phase—shop, apply, and onboarding—addresses distinct challenges while maintaining a cohesive, user-friendly flow. I was a core design contributor in this effort, leading the design of several shop experiences and collaborating closely with design leads, researchers, and product partners.
Navigating ambiguity through various workshops
At the start of the Business Essentials project, we faced significant ambiguity:
Stakeholders had different interpretations of the product flow
Internal processes (especially approval, funding, and compliance checks) were unclear and siloed
There was no shared understanding of what the customer experience should feel like
Approach
To bring clarity and alignment across multiple teams, I held a series of stakeholder workshops throughout the discovery phase. Each session focused on surfacing hidden assumptions, breaking silos, and visualizing the end-to-end experience.
This customer and process mapping workshop was one of them.
In this session, I facilitated a cross-functional group—including product, compliance, development, and marketing—to collaboratively:
Define a archetype (Leah, a small business owner)
Map user's journey from product discovery through account activation
Layer in internal system actions and dependencies (e.g., verification logic, risk checks, funding workflows)
Capture customer thoughts and pain points at each stage of the flow
By combining customer perspective with operational insight, this workshop helped expose critical gaps in understanding and created a shared mental model for moving forward.
Success metrics
User satisfaction
By simplifying account setup, clarifying navigation, and aligning design decisions with real user pain points uncovered in research, we aimed to deliver an experience that builds trust and satisfaction.
Operational efficiencies
Through optimized user flows, progressive disclosure, and clear microcopy, we reduced onboarding steps and decision fatigue to accelerate time-to-setup.
Revenue growth
Design prioritized visibility and ease of access to high-value features like payment tools and cash flow tracking, encouraging deeper feature adoption and upsell opportunities.
Engagement
We designed key workflows to be efficient, repeatable, and mobile-friendly — driving habitual use and reducing drop-off in high-intent tasks.
SWOT analysis
As part of our discovery process, we used SWOT analysis to clarify product direction. It helped us assess internal capabilities, anticipate external risks, and prioritize design trade-offs—especially around integration complexity, flow simplification, and compliance readiness.
Strengths
User-centered product built for SBOs workflows
Simplified flows reduce time and friction
Broad reach backed by U.S. Bank’s trust
Weaknesses
Feature set may overwhelm new users
Unclear pricing causes decision friction
Integration complexity slows iteration
Opportunities
High demand for unified financial tools
Potential for partner integrations
Adaptive flows for varied business types
Space for AI-powered assistance
Threats
Competitors offer simpler onboarding
High switching costs block adoption
Platform constraints from legacy tools
UX must meet compliance demands
Grounding product design in user voice when data falls short
To ground the design in real customer needs, we conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with 8 small business owners across industries such as professional services, retail, construction, transportation, and wellness. From these interviews, several key themes emerged:
Integration and Simplicity
“My ideal financial partner, and I’m sort of thinking of something like a tech partner, an app, or you know, something like that I could use would bring together all the functionality of the different apps.”
Brad, 45, Attorney, california
“I would love a management system that’s digital, centralized, and powerful. I’m doing too much on paper, and it’s a hassle to have two systems for online and in-store payments. The online tools I can afford just don’t cut it.”
Business Owner
Business owners emphasize the need for a unified platform that integrates all financial tools into one seamless experience, eliminating the frustration of juggling multiple systems.
Holistic Financial Support
“I would love to have a bank that looks holistically at the health of my entire business when reviewing a loan application, not just a few out-of-context numbers on my tax return.”
Anonymous Business owner
“I would love a management system that’s digital, centralized, and powerful. I’m doing too much on paper, and it’s a hassle to have two systems for online and in-store payments. The online tools I can afford just don’t cut it.”
Savio, 45, Wellness Coaching, New York
These insights highlight the desire for personalized, holistic support from financial institutions, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach
Innovative Financial Solutions
“Instead of the bank just handling money and making loans, I would love for it to sort of turn into an investing model where you opt in, and banks invest on your behalf, and everyone wins. I would be more than happy with sharing a portion of my profits.”
Nicole, 33, Apparel & Accessories, California
This quote reflects a growing demand for innovative financial solutions that go beyond traditional banking services, such as automated investing or profit-sharing models.
Challenges in Funding and Support
“It was a little challenging trying to get capital to fund my business. So I had to have my husband step in on a couple of occasions to help me out. But it is challenging, and I’m learning the ropes in this male-dominated industry..”
Lynette, 49, Transportation, Georgia
This quote underscores the difficulties small business owners face in accessing funding, especially in industries where they may be underrepresented.
User Journey
I led the discovery phase by translating qualitative insights into a journey map that reframed how the team approached user pain points, priorities, and product decisions—shaping both the design direction and cross-functional alignment.
Information architecture restructuring
Our interviews and journey mapping showed us exactly where users struggled to compare offerings. By restructuring the IA, we translated user needs into a tangible system that highlighted value proposition sooner.
Apply user flow
Using insights gathered from our earlier interviews and journey mapping, we refined the apply flow to reduce friction and increase clarity.
Pre-filled known data with business lookups to reduce repetition
Grouped steps logically (business info → account funding → Review & Edit)
Displayed clear progress indicators so users know where they are
Tailored the flow for business needs like merchant services or multiple deposits
Allowed users to review and edit before submission
Impact
These changes directly addressed usability concerns from our research and helped increasing completion confidence.
Extending impact: Redesigning an enterprise component for product selection
Transforming a rigid table into a scalable design pattern used across business lines.
As part of the shop experience, I was initially asked to add Business Essentials to an existing comparison table. However, I recognized this as an opportunity to rethink the component as a modular product selection interface that could serve multiple offerings across the enterprise.
View full case study
A seamless application experience
The apply experience followed a linear wizard-style flow with clearly defined phases and contextually grouped inputs. Unnecessary steps were removed, and lightweight conditional logic ensured users only saw what was relevant to their business setup. This approach improved clarity, reduced form fatigue, and supported faster completion rates.
Bringing clarity to the application: dynamic
Progress indicator
Problem
Through interviews and journey mapping, we discovered that small business owners often felt uncertain during the application process, asking questions like: “How long will this take?” or “Where am I in the process?”
The lack of clear visibility increased drop-off risk.
Solution
To solve this, I designed a dynamic progress indicator that:
Clearly outlined each phase of the application (e.g., Personal Info → Business Info → Funding → Review)
Provided real-time feedback on current step and what’s ahead
Included a “You’ll need” checklist up front to help users prepare
Supported branching logic, so users only saw steps relevant to their business type (e.g., if they needed merchant services)
Impact
Reduced friction and uncertainty by setting clear expectations early
20–30% increase in completion rates
Reduced perceived time by up to 25%
Decreased user drop-off at midpoint by 15-20%
Fewer support calls or chats
Reflection
What I learned
As a lead UX designer, I helped launch U.S. Bank’s Business Essentials—a bundled solution that combined checking, payments, and POS tools for small businesses. The redesign resulted in a 92% improvement in navigation scores and a 60% reduction in onboarding time.
These results were driven by key strategies:
Cross-functional collaboration enabled alignment
I facilitated various workshops with U.S. Bank, Elavon, and telach to align teams, identify assumptions, and define success metrics early in the project. These sessions helped build shared understanding and accelerate decision-making.
Research informed product decisions
User interviews uncovered common pain points, which directly informed flow improvements and feature prioritization. This allowed us to validate design direction early and reduce risk.
Scalable design supported enterprise needs
I redesigned a global component used across the organization. This work ensured consistency, simplified complex information, and supported long-term scalability.
This project highlighted the importance of collaboration, user research, and system thinking in delivering measurable business outcomes.
Challenges I faced
Cross-team alignment across multiple organizations
Collaborating with U.S. Bank, Elavon, and telach required navigating different systems, roadmaps, and communication styles. Establishing shared goals and consistent workflows across silos took time and active facilitation.
Lack of clear success metrics
At project kickoff, success was loosely defined. I led working sessions and stakeholder workshops to clarify KPIs and align on measurable outcomes.
Regulatory and compliance constraints
Designing in a highly regulated environment involved continuous reviews, strict content standards, and legal requirements. We worked closely with compliance and legal partners to ensure solutions met regulatory standards while maintaining a smooth user experience.