Research rewrote the flow.
Not just the screens.

Context

In 2022, applying for a joint loan at most UK banks meant going into a branch with your partner, or posting signed documents. Single-applicant loans had gone digital long ago, but joint loans hadn't. The regulatory weight was heavier, the edge cases messier, and the legal teams cautious.

I was part of NatWest's account opening team (a retail bank with 20 million customers in the UK) and took the brief to design a fully digital journey, constrained to two existing NatWest account holders. Non-customers were out of scope.

The problem

The obvious design problem was how to let two people sign one application online without a branch visit. The less obvious one was this: a branch visit is a trust mechanism. A colleague verifies identity, witnesses consent, handles the moment where two people commit to something legally binding together. Replicating that online, without creating friction that broke the journey, was the real design challenge. Online, you can't just ask the second person to confirm it's them (fraud risk is too high), so they have to log in. That constraint shaped a lot of the design decisions that followed.

The harder problem, which emerged during research, was that users and legal disagreed about what "secure enough" and "good enough" looked like, and each round shifted the balance.

3 colours = 3 applicant states. Blue: together. Green: Person 1. Yellow: Person 2.

Every colour switch is a handover. Every handover is a login.

One handover instead of many. The reasoning written before any wireframe.

My approach

Let research be the argument

Research ran fully remote during COVID, which turned out to be the most useful constraint of the project. Instead of hearing about users' home lives in abstract, we watched them. Kids screaming in the background. One applicant in the kitchen, the other in another room, called over only when strictly necessary. Half-finished cups of tea and laptops balanced on knees.

Legal, understandably, had been imagining the default scenario: two calm adults sitting side by side at a clean desk, both fully present, both equally engaged. That picture held up badly against what we were seeing every session.

I started bringing this directly into the legal conversations. Not as a complaint, but as a design input. If the real situation is "one person driving, the other available intermittently," the journey needs to work for that. It shifted the framing from "how do we force both users to do everything together" to "how do we let one lead while keeping the second legally protected."

Research also surfaced something consistent about device. When asked where they'd apply for a loan, users were clear: it was a "proper task," the kind of thing you'd sit down at a laptop to do properly. Nobody said they'd reach for their phone. That shaped a deliberate choice to optimise the journey for desktop and laptop rather than designing to accommodate every device equally.

Design around the hand-over, not around the togetherness

Instead of asking both applicants to move through the form in parallel, I let the design match how it actually happens.

• Applicant 1 completes around 90% of the work. Name-tagged questions make it clear whose data is being entered at any moment, which came directly from a Round 1 insight.
• Applicant 1 signs their portion and hands the device over. Applicant 2 logs in.
• Applicant 2 sees a summary of what's been entered, their own version of the legal documents, confirms and signs.
• A joint confirmation page closes the loop.

To keep both applicants oriented through the hand-over, I worked with the wider account opening UX team in an ideation workshop and we landed on a "stagegate" component: a visual progress marker that showed each applicant where they were and what was still to come. Small thing, but it was what stopped Applicant 2 feeling parachuted in.

Applicant 2 sees their role before they’ve even logged in. No surprises at hand-over.

Get it in writing

The biggest process lesson from this project was about legal sign-off, not design. A verbal "we're happy with this direction" meant less than I'd assumed. After Round 1, I started documenting every legal decision in writing, getting it confirmed in email, and keeping a running log of what had been agreed and when. It slowed the early conversations and saved weeks of rework later.

Designed to work for everyone

The stagegate component was the most consequential accessibility decision. It would have been easy to build as a purely visual progress marker: position in the flow, colour, layout. Instead it used explicit text labels alongside the visuals, so both applicants could stay oriented regardless of how they were accessing the page. The name-tagged questions ("Sally's details," "Laura's details") had the same logic: clear context that worked for screen reader users and felt natural for sighted ones. When accessibility and usability point in the same direction, you've made the right call.

The confirmation was a considered moment, not just a summary screen. The copy "Sally and Laura, the loan's yours" names both applicants and uses a warm, personal register rather than a transactional one. The car illustration was a deliberate choice to mark completion as an event worth acknowledging. In banking the space for delight is narrow; you can't be playful with someone's finances. But the end of a completed journey is one of the few moments where it's entirely appropriate, and it was worth using well.

Outcomes

The journey launched as the first fully digital joint loan application at a UK bank. The hand-over structure remains live today under NatWest's current branding. Business priorities shifted the go-live timeline after the design completed, and I'd moved on by then, so I don't have post-launch performance data to share.

The significance wasn't primarily in the product metrics anyway. Journeys like this one were part of how NatWest was actively repositioning itself, moving away from a bank where important life moments required a branch visit, towards one built around how people, families and businesses actually live. Being first to market on digital joint loans wasn't just a product milestone. It was a signal about the kind of bank NatWest was becoming, and this project was a tangible part of making that case.

Round 3 testing was the clearest positive signal of the project itself: applicants described it as "quick and painless" and specifically valued being able to let one person lead.

A note on confidentiality: Screens and interaction structure shown here are simplified representations. Specific product details have been generalised.