A Look at BlackLine’s New Modern User Experience

Greater accessibility, new menu navigation, and revamped dashboards—these are some of the features in BlackLine’s new user interface design that lay the foundation for a more modernized and consistent experience.

The latest round of enhancements features more white space between rows and larger typefaces to enhance readability, while better support has been rolled out for screen readers. Additionally, new button treatments guide users to primary calls to action on each page to improve usability.

We’ve also updated the menu navigation and global header to help users easily access reports, admin settings, and the work of the day. Finally, newly designed dashboards include fast visualizations for custom views across specific fields.

“The new UI is intended to help users focus on the job at hand, and access the information they need quickly and easily, so F&A teams can easily identify and focus on critical matters that require their attention,” says BlackLine’s Director of Solutions Marketing Molly Boyle.

“Finance and Accounting are continually being asked to do more with less,” she says. “The new BlackLine experience will help these teams focus on getting their work done, rather than worrying about the technology.”

Users can now drill down to their individual assignments with a new dashboard experience. A My Work view features dashboards to help users keep track of individual tasks, while a new Analytics tab can be configured to help measure and track the KPIs that are critical to the organization.

An expanded period selector now lets the user expand any year in customized period increments. “We did this because many customers are on odd accounting calendars. They may have 13 periods in a year, or even 365,” she says, “So this makes it easier for the user to focus on the job at hand, rather than on the interface itself.”

The new UI, which will continue to evolve over time, has benefited from a series of sandbox trials with BlackLine customers that started in April.

Boyle notes that these trials and the resulting upgrades to the UI reflect BlackLine’s commitment to responding to its customers in new product development.

“This is something that BlackLine gets high marks for in industry surveys,” she says. “And paying attention to customers is good not just for the customers but for BlackLine itself, because the better we listen, the better the products we can make.”

Read our latest issue of BlackLine Quarterly for more stories like this that can help your F&A organization move out of the disruption caused by the pandemic and into the light of a more normal—and fruitful—future.