Project Overview

When COVID19 hit, and the government passed the CARES Act to provide funds to keep small businesses afloat during the pandemic. Our product team got assigned to design and develop the entire application portal within just 72 hours before it was released to the public (this ended up being release 1 of many). I was the sole designer that initial release and a few months after that, but we later onboarded an additional designer.

The portal is divided into 2 distinct pieces: the application process, and the forgiveness process.

Year

2019

Role

Lead UX and UI Designer

Stats Since Launch

used by 70,000+ small businesses

My Role

I was the lead designer, and involved in the process from the very beginning, reviewing the goverment requirements alongside our legal team, technology team, and product manager. After creating the hi-fi prototype, I co-led the user testing with "friends and family" clients before we released the forgiveness portion of the portal. When we brought on a new designer later on, it was also my role to transition the work and onboard them to the project. 

The Users

The Paycheck Protection Program Portal is used by both internal PNC employees, as well as the owners and accountants of the small businesses. 

Select Screens

Eligible Nonpayroll Costs: The main user of these set of screens is the small business owner or accountant (if they have one). This is phase 2 of the process, after the funds from the government have been used.

Essentially, the small business is telling us how the money was spent, and our portal calculates how much of that is forgiven based on government requirements.The eligible nonpayroll costs include things like electricity, mortgage, rent, etc. 

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Assumptions and Alternate Screens

Eligible Nonpayroll Costs: Before we settled on the above set of screens, I had originally designed this v1 of the eligible nonpayroll costs. Based on early assumptions, we thought that most customers would want to link their business credit card accounts to pick and choose which transactions to import. Upon further research and user interviews, we found these assumptions to be false and scrapped this version for the more recent one.  

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