CLIENT:
Axos Bank
CONTRIBUTION:
User Research, Prototypes, High Fidelity Mockups, User Testing
TOOLS:
Figma, FigJam, Microsoft Teams
YEAR:
2025
Small Business Banking
about.
Axos Bank is a digital-first bank with an established consumer banking product. As the bank expanded into small business, the product and desieng team faced a question: what does the Axos banking experience look like for a customer with both a consumer and business account?
I led the UX design exploration and high-fidelity work for this project. The approach was to build from the existing consumer screens rather than start fresh — which meant figuring out which patterns could carry over into a business context and discovering net new designs.
challenge.
Axos needed to design a banking experience for a customer the existing product wasn't built for: someone who holds both a personal and a business account at the same bank.
The product only knew one context. The Axos banking experience was built entirely around the consumer. A customer with a business account logged in and saw a personal finance product — savings account, basic account settings. There was no navigation and no mental model in the existing product that accounted for a business account existing alongside it.
The same person, two different jobs to do. A dual-account customer isn't two separate users — they're one person switching modes throughout their day. In the morning they're paying a vendor from their business account. In the evening they're checking their personal savings. The existing product had no way to support that shift. Moving between contexts meant friction that shouldn't exist: the product didn't know the business account was there.
Consumer patterns had to be adapted, not abandoned. Our design patterns and the established consumer UI gave us a foundation — and constraints. The business side of the experience couldn't look or behave like a separate product. It had to feel like a natural extension of the Axos experience the customer already knew. That meant knowing which consumer patterns to carry over and which ones would break under a business context.
result.
We delivered high-fidelity designs and flows for the dual-account customer experience — a banking product that could hold both a consumer and business account in one place — ready to present to stakeholders.
Auditing what existed before designing anything new. I started by mapping the consumer product against the needs of a dual-account customer — not to find what to replace, but to find what could hold. Workflows like transferring money and account settings carried over. Navigation structure, consumer marketing assets, and the dashboard's single-account assumption did not.
A context switcher that made the switch feel like a feature, not a workaround. The core design challenge for the dual-account customer was the moment of switching — moving from personal to business mode inside the same product. I designed an interaction in the navigation: clearly visible, no logout, no separate app. The harder problem was making that switch feel deliberate rather than disorienting. The user's account context, dashboard layout, and available actions all change when they switch — but the product's visual language and interaction model stay consistent.
Naming what wasn't in scope. Entitlements — controlling which team members can access which business information and take which actions — were part of the long-term vision but out of scope for MVP. I worked alongside another designer to mock up frames as the next phase, not an unresolved gap.
