Overview

Blink is an audiovisual production company that connects talent and creative teams. It has a proprietary platform for managing productions, teams, vendors, and finances.

The vendor onboarding was a manual process, completely dependent on the operations team, susceptible to errors, and generating delays that directly impacted production timelines.

The goal

Design a self-service onboarding system capable of:

• Collecting personal, tax, and banking information

• Automatically generating contracts

• Reducing errors in critical information for contracts and payments

The challenge was to create a clear, guided experience that minimized errors, avoided drop-off, and reduced dependence on the operations team.

Research & insights

I conducted exploratory interviews with the production and operations teams, working together to reconstruct the current process, identify friction points, and align legal and financial requirements.

Key insights:

• There were multiple onboarding scenarios depending on the type of vendor (individuals, companies, legal representatives)

• The required documentation varied by case and was often incomplete

• Tax and banking data required specific validations

• The process relied heavily on the operations team

• There was no clear or standardized workflow

Key finding:

The problem was not only the interface, but also the lack of process structure.
Knowledge was distributed across the team, not in the system.

In addition, the onboarding volume (5–30 suppliers per week) made the manual model unsustainable.

Design approach

The focus was on transforming an implicit, operational process into a structured and scalable flow.

• I mapped information and documentation requirements by supplier type together with operations.

• I defined specific flows for each user scenario and iterated on them with key stakeholders.

• I validated the flows with the operations team to ensure feasibility and coverage of real cases.

• I collaborated with development to integrate digital contract signing and close the end-to-end process.

Key principle:
Reduce perceived complexity through progression, context, and early validation.

User flow

The onboarding was structured as a progressive, stage-based process, dynamically adapted according to the type of user.

Each stage:

• Shows only the information needed at that moment

• Reduces cognitive load

• Allows data to be validated before moving forward

The following were incorporated:

• Dynamic forms according to account type

• Real-time validations for sensitive data

• Contextual help in complex fields

• Preventive messages to avoid common errors
  
  

Solution

The solution was developed in collaboration with the operations and development teams, ensuring that the flow covered both business needs and technical constraints.

A guided onboarding flow was designed that includes:

• Early identification of the supplier type

• Progressive stage-by-stage navigation

• Adaptive forms

• Real-time validations

• Immediate feedback on errors and missing items

• Final review before submission
  
  

Once the form is submitted, the operations team performs a KYS check and validation and automatically generates a contract (Freelancer Agreement) for digital signing.

Once the contract is signed, the supplier becomes available to be assigned to projects.

Validation

• I tested a prototype with the operations team and a few vendors who worked with the company regularly.

• Users understood the steps and completed the process without major issues.

• I made some adjustments to labels and contextual information.

A few months after launch, I ran a second round of interviews with the operations team and worked on a new iteration to address some friction around how users had to fill in certain fields, and to add the contextual help that was missing.

Impact

Onboarding went from being a manual process to a self-service flow:

As a result:

• Intervention from the operations team was significantly reduced

• Errors in documentation and critical data decreased

• Vendor onboarding times were accelerated

• The system was able to handle a higher onboarding volume without increasing operational load

The operations team stopped handling repetitive tasks and was able to focus on critical production situations.