JoelleLee

Honeycomb Credit internship

Honeycomb Credit internship

Fintech Platform UX Design

Summer 2025

Summer 2025

Summer 2025

Role: Solo UX Intern

Role: Solo UX Intern

Role: Solo UX Intern

UI/UX Design & User Research

UI/UX Design & User Research

UI/UX Design & User Research

Tools: Figma, v0 (Vercel)

Tools: Figma, v0 (Vercel)

Tools: Figma, v0 (Vercel)

3

User Flows
Audited & Redesigned

1

End-to-End Product Workflow Designed

25%

Faster Loan
Application Time

3

User Flows
Audited & Redesigned

1

End-to-End Product
Workflow Designed

25%

Faster Loan
Application Time

3

User Flows
Audited & Redesigned

1

End-to-End Product Workflow Designed

25%

Faster Loan
Application Time

Overview

Honeycomb Credit is a community investment platform that connects everyday investors with local small businesses seeking funding. During my internship, I worked on two initiatives:

  1. Conducting a UX audit of key investor and business-owner workflows to uncover usability issues and redesign high-friction experiences.

  2. Designing the Offering Manager, a new self-service tool that enables business owners to manage and update their investment offerings.


As the sole UX intern, I owned the audit process, design recommendations, and end-to-end feature design work.

Challenges

UX Auditing & Redesigning

Reflection

Designing Offering Manager

Challenges

UX Auditing & Redesigning

Designing Offering Manager

Reflection

Challenges

UX Auditing & Redesigning

Designing Offering Manager

Reflection

Challenges

Existing user flows contained friction

Critical workflows (investor sign-up, business discovery, and the loan application process) contained usability issues that could create confusion, increase drop-off risk, and reduce trust during important decision-making moments.


Business owners lacked control over their offerings

Once an investment offering was published, business owners had no self-service way to update content such as business descriptions, photos, team information, or offering details. Updates required manual intervention from Honeycomb staff, creating operational bottlenecks and limiting owner autonomy.

Existing user flows contained friction

Critical workflows (investor sign-up, business discovery, and the loan application process) contained usability issues that could create confusion, increase drop-off risk, and reduce trust during important decision-making moments.


Business owners lacked control over their offerings

Once an investment offering was published, business owners had no self-service way to update content such as business descriptions, photos, team information, or offering details. Updates required manual intervention from Honeycomb staff, creating operational bottlenecks and limiting owner autonomy.

UX Auditing & Redesigning

Audited investor onboarding across web and mobile experiences, business search filter feature, and loan application by evaluating each journey as a first-time user

Onboarding Redesign

Filter Feature Redesign

Loan Application Redesign

Onboarding Redesign

Filter Feature Redesign

Loan Application Redesign

Onboarding Redesign

Filter Feature
Redesign

Loan Application Redesign

Onboarding Process

Onboarding Process:

redesigning to reduce drop-off rates during sign up

Onboarding Process: redesigning to reduce drop-off rates during sign up

Redesigning to reduce drop-off rates during sign up

Onboarding Process:

redesigning to reduce drop-off rates during sign up

Onboarding Process: redesigning to reduce drop-off rates during sign up

Key Findings: Users' ability to explore opportunities were visually limited to an unintuitive category filter and a search field.

Redesign: Expanded discovery into a multi-layer filtering experience that allows users to quickly filter "Active Offerings," "Years in Business," and "Business Types".


Users can also further filter through "All Filters" which has more categories and allows users to:


  • Save a custom combination of filtered categories

  • Access saved filters

  • Access recent filtered searches

Business Search & Filtering: redesigning to improve and increase filters usability

Loan Application: redesigning to simplify and improve application experience

Key Findings: Users had difficulty navigating the original loan application's long pages with minimal segmentation and limited progress visualizations. As a result, the experience felt repetitive, overwhelming, and unnecessarily time-consuming. The Personal Financial Statement page served as the biggest challenge with 9 separate information categories in 1 scroll-heavy experience.

Redesign: To reduce cognitive load and improve wayfinding, I restructured the application into a more guided, streamlined workflow.


The largest changes revolved around:


  • Breaking the Personal Finance Statement into 3 dedicated sub-steps

  • Adding sidebar navigation that visualizes users' progress

  • Reorganizing and scaling crucial information architecture

Longest Page on ORIGINAL Loan Application

Longest Page on REDESIGNED Loan Application

The restructured information architecture and redesigned UI optimized the process, resulting in a ~25% faster completion time during testing.

During usability testing, several friction points were identified throughout the onboarding flow, including a lack of confirmation after email verification, no way to correct an incorrectly entered email, insufficient explanation for SSN collection, unclear mobile validation feedback, and poor visibility of Terms of Service links. To address these issues, the redesign introduced clear verification status messaging, an email correction flow, contextual explanations for SSN requests, inline validation states, and more prominent Terms of Service links, improving both transparency and usability throughout the experience.

During usability testing, several friction points were identified throughout the onboarding flow, including a lack of confirmation after email verification, no way to correct an incorrectly entered email, insufficient explanation for SSN collection, unclear mobile validation feedback, and poor visibility of Terms of Service links. To address these issues, the redesign introduced clear verification status messaging, an email correction flow, contextual explanations for SSN requests, inline validation states, and more prominent Terms of Service links, improving both transparency and usability throughout the experience.

Business Search & Filtering

Business Search & Filtering:

redesigning to improve and increase filters usability

Redesigning to improve and increase filters usability

Business Search & Filtering:

redesigning to improve and increase filters usability

Users' ability to explore opportunities were visually limited to an unintuitive category filter and a search field.


I expanded discovery to allow users to quickly filter "Active Offerings," "Years in Business," and "Business Types".


Users can also further filter through "All Filters" which has more categories and allows users to:


  • Save a custom combination of filtered categories

  • Access saved filters

  • Access recent filtered searches

Redesign: Expanded discovery to allow users to quickly filter "Active Offerings," "Years in Business," and "Business Types".


Users can also further filter through "All Filters" which has more categories and allows users to:


  • Save a custom combination of filtered categories

  • Access saved filters

  • Access recent filtered searches

Loan Application

Loan Application:

redesigning to simplify and improve application experience

Redesigning to simplify and improve application experience

Loan Application:

redesigning to simplify and improve application experience

Users had difficulty navigating the original loan application's long pages with minimal segmentation and limited progress visualizations. As a result, the experience felt repetitive, overwhelming, and unnecessarily time-consuming. The Personal Financial Statement page served as the biggest challenge with 9 separate information categories in 1 scroll-heavy experience.

Key Findings: Users had difficulty navigating the original loan application's long pages with minimal segmentation and limited progress visualizations.


As a result, the experience felt repetitive, overwhelming, and unnecessarily time-consuming. The Personal Financial Statement page served as the biggest challenge with 9 separate information categories in 1 scroll-heavy experience.

ORIGINAL Loan Application's Longest Page

REDESIGNED Loan Application's Longest Page

To reduce cognitive load and improve wayfinding, I restructured the application into a more guided, streamlined workflow.

The largest changes revolved around:


  • Breaking the Personal Finance Statement into 3 dedicated sub-steps


  • Adding sidebar navigation that visualizes users' progress


  • Reorganizing and scaling crucial information architecture

The restructured information architecture and redesigned UI optimized the process, resulting in a ~25% faster completion time during testing.

The restructured information architecture and redesigned UI optimized the process, resulting in a ~25% faster completion time during testing.

End-to-End Designing Offering Manager

The Offering Manager represented an opportunity to design an entirely new end-to-end business-owner workflow.

The Problem


Business owners had no way to independently update their offering information after publication.

Any update required manual staff involvement, slowing operations and reducing transparency.

Design Goal


Create a self-service system that enables business owners to manage their offerings while preserving Honeycomb's review process.

Dashboard UI


Honeycomb users participate as both investors and business owners.


To incorporate the Offering Manager within a system that supports both roles within a single account, I designed an Investor / Business toggle that switches dashboard context without requiring separate accounts.

The Offering Manager consists of:


  • 1 dashboard for a complete edit-to-publish workflow

  • Preview page feature

  • 6 update steps

  • Offering status visibility

  • Offering analytics

Key UX Decisions:


  • Intuitive User Journey

  • Consistent Save and Reset controls within each module

  • Collapsible navigation for focused workflow

  • Visibility into the approval & site publishing process

Key UX Decisions:


  • Intuitive Business Owner Journey

  • Consistent Save and Reset controls in each update module

  • Collapsible navigation for focused workflow

  • Visibility into the approval & site publishing process

The workflow transformed a previously invisible review process into a transparent system that helps business owners understand exactly where their updates are in the approval pipeline.

Reflection

As the sole UX intern, I navigated the challenges of navigating projects independently while learning how to present design work, defend decisions, and communicate effectively with executives, product leaders, and cross-functional teams.

Information Architecture shapes user journeys

Organizing content is just as important as designing interfaces. Structuring the Offering Manager and loan application workflows reinforced how thoughtful information architecture can reduce complexity and make large systems easier to navigate.


Designing for Everyday Users Requires Transparency

In financial products, users need more than functionality, they need confidence. Progress tracking, status visibility, and clear feedback helped transform opaque processes into experiences that felt predictable and trustworthy.


Reduce Complexity Through Structure

Breaking large tasks into focused, manageable steps reduced cognitive load and improved orientation. Rather than presenting everything at once, guiding users through information incrementally created a more approachable experience.

Key Takeaways


Information Architecture shapes user journeys


Organizing content is just as important as designing interfaces. Structuring the Offering Manager and loan application workflows reinforced how thoughtful information architecture can reduce complexity and make large systems easier to navigate.


Designing for Everyday Users Requires Transparency


In financial products, users need more than functionality, they need confidence. Progress tracking, status visibility, and clear feedback helped transform opaque processes into experiences that felt predictable and trustworthy.


Reduce Complexity Through Structure


Breaking large tasks into focused, manageable steps reduced cognitive load and improved orientation. Rather than presenting everything at once, guiding users through information incrementally created a more approachable experience.