B2C
Fintech
Consumer lending
2021
Redesigning My Community Finance's consumer loan application journey
As the sole designer at My Community Finance, a consumer lender, I redesigned the loan application journey — the funnel where approved applicants complete their details and accept their offer. The journey worked, but customers were dropping out along the way and we had almost no data explaining why. Working under a tight budget, I ran a scrappy "build-and-learn" diagnosis, rebuilt the journey around clarity, usefulness and trust, and set up a validation plan to prove the new design before the business committed to further investment.
The problem
The application journey was quietly losing customers. We could watch conversion fall step by step — from every applicant who landed, down to around 46% by the final loan details page — but page-level conversion was the only meaningful data we had. We knew where people left, not why. For a lender whose revenue depends on completed applications, that gap between the drop-off and the explanation was an expensive one to leave unexamined.
Discovery & Problem definition
Diagnosing the drop-off with the tools I had
With no budget for a formal research programme, I built a picture of the problem from the tools already available. A simple time analysis across 500 Hotjar recordings surfaced three recurring patterns: confident users who raced through in a couple of minutes, careful readers who moved slowly but without friction, and a struggling group who only reached the end after roughly five times the average interaction cost. Recordings and heatmaps then showed where that friction concentrated — data-entry fields like employment, job sector and bank details, and a login dead-end where returning customers filled in the whole form only to be told their email was already in use. I supplemented this with competitor analysis, Trustpilot themes, conversations with the customer-service team and a short on-site survey, so the redesign was grounded in evidence rather than assumption.
Articulating problem to solve
Framing the redesign around usability, usefulness and credibility
To turn scattered findings into a direction, I framed the problem through three lenses — could the journey be more useable, more useful, and more credible? Useable covered the mechanics: clearer visual hierarchy, form design that reduced guesswork, an error summary, a proper login route for registered customers, and fewer pages and clicks overall. Useful pushed on what customers actually weighed when comparing lenders — not only APR, but speed, service and staying in control. Credible addressed a subtler signal the competitor research kept raising: people wanted to understand who they were borrowing from before they'd commit. It gave the team a shared, memorable way to prioritise.
Ideation & Secondary Research
Rebuilding the journey
The redesign worked on all three fronts at once. I cut and reordered steps to shorten the path to completion, and rebuilt the data-entry components customers had struggled with — clearer labels, inline validation, hint text, an error summary, and patterns like type-to-search and masked inputs for fields such as sort codes. I fixed the login dead-end so returning customers were recognised early rather than at the finish line. Alongside the interface, I rewrote legacy copy that testing had flagged as confusing — starting from a list of assumptions about wording like "conditionally approved" or "are you a member of a trade union?", where the existing text assumed knowledge customers didn't have. And I introduced the credibility cues competitors used well: plainer explanations of who we were, why each piece of information was needed, and visible signals of the partners and regulators behind the product.
Testing & Validaiton
De-risking the redesign before committing
Because "build-and-learn" meant shipping with real but limited upfront research, validation was where the design earned its confidence. I designed a testing plan built around three complementary methods: user interviews to understand how people think while comparing and applying for loans; a head-to-head comparison where half the participants used the old design and half the new one, so we could isolate whether perceptions actually shifted; and open-ended content-testing tasks to check whether the rewritten copy communicated what customers needed. I also ran a simple highlighting exercise — participants marking what inspired trust in green and what raised suspicion in red — to make the credibility signal tangible rather than theoretical.
Ideation & Secondary Research
Owning the redesign end to end
As the only designer on the product, I owned this from diagnosis through to the finished UI, working closely with product and commercial to keep the redesign grounded in both customer need and business reality. The constraints — no analytics stack, minimal budget, a lean team — shaped the approach as much as the problem did, and taught me how to build a credible case for change from whatever evidence is actually available.
