Bokio

Bokio in Sweden and in the UK enables small business owners to take control over their own accounting by automating tedious tasks and provides a user interface that makes sense and is easy to understand how good (or bad) your business financials really are.

I joined Bokio in January 2018 as Head of Design and was the first hire for the management team apart from the founders Viktor and Mikael. Back then we were a staff of 12 and only two designers, me included. During my time at Bokio we grew the design team to around 12 designers, ux researchers and art directors and a staff of more than 100 people in two offices and two countries.

During my time at Bokio I’ve had many hats and worked across the entire design field and beyond. Being in a small startup with limited resources, this was natural as a part of the small management team. My responsibility was mainly to design the product, find and hire new talent and to grow and support the designers, user researchers and art directors.

• Had a driving role in the product team to develop new features and initiatives.
• Initiated and led a complete rebrand of the product and the company.
• Created design system foundations, processes and a Design System team for all our products and devices.
• Hired and led the Product Design team.
• Hired and led the Communications and Marketing team.
• Led the Growth team to find new opportunities in the user journey.

Most people thinks that accounting is something difficult and often boring. How do you make that easy and fun instead? Well, we managed to do so with an easy to understand accounting system and a good UX to go along with that. Using Bokio for all you business financials, you get a good up-to-date overview and the boring tasks of recording your expenses is done with just a few clicks. No financial degree necessary.

We even got A LOT of comments saying that we made accounting fun for people. Imagine that!

Bokio is available for Sweden and the United Kingdom. Users can access from anywhere, with iOS and Android apps included. We even lauched a bank integrated in the system complete with debit cards. When a users made a purchase it automatically suggested how to bookeep it and reminded you to upload the reciept.

The design team was small in the beginning and I was responsible for all types of design work. However as we grew, my role gradually focused more on our design language and to steer the other designers in the right direction. But I always kept designing and was an active part of the core product team.

The design team was small in the beginning and I was responsible for all types of design work. However as we grew, my role gradually focused more on our design language and to steer the other designers in the right direction.

We created a design system that outlined all elements of the application. A big part was to align how we speak about our components in the product teams, both between designers but also between engineers. Bokio is a very complex product with a lot of edge cases in different markets.

Bokio had an established brand when I joined, that worked alright for the digital product in the beginning. However, as we grew and also started to do marketing and added payment cards to that mix - it was time for an update.

With this change everything needed to be updated including all the products. In this process we managed to clean up many of the main flows and make them even simpler. One example was the recording flow for new purchases as you can see below.

This was a project that invloved the entire company, led by me together with our Art Directors Nikolina Kanmert and Bim Hjortonsteen, but the entire design team was highly involced the in the outcome. We included every stakeholder through out the entire process and settled on the word Balance as our guiding star.

All the above showcased work was a team effort of all the product people at Bokio, some of it I’ve done myself and others where I’ve been leading the work. Special shoutout to all of the members of the design team!