B2C
Fintech
Consumer lending
2021
Designing a self-serve loan top-up from scratch
As the sole designer at My Community Finance, I designed new features end to end. Customers who wanted to borrow more against an existing loan had no way to do it themselves — every top-up meant a phone call, with the customer success team walking people through the process by hand. Commercial made self-serve top-up the next priority, and I owned the design of the journey from discovery through to a tested, shippable flow.
The problem
Topping up a loan was one of the most common reasons customers called in, and one of the most resource-intensive to handle. Each request had to be talked through manually — eligibility, affordability, the paperwork — because none of it existed on the platform. It was slow for customers and expensive for the business, and it didn't scale. The brief was to turn a phone-based, agent-led process into something a customer could complete on their own.
Discovery workshop
Getting the domain knowledge I needed, fast
Topping up a loan isn't just moving money into a loan account — there's eligibility, affordability, regulatory constraints, and re-contracting to account for. To get up to speed quickly, I planned and moderated a workshop with internal subject-matter experts. It had three goals: pull the domain and regulatory knowledge out of the SMEs' heads, draft the steps a user would move through and what to disclose at each one, and build a shared understanding across the team so we were aligned from the start rather than at the end.
Testing & Validation
Refining the journey through usability testing
I finalised the design across several rounds of usability testing with current customers, taking each of them through the top-up journey end to end. Questioning them at each step surfaced where the interface was unclear and where the flow could be smoother, and every round fed directly into the next iteration.
Results
Reducing the load on customer success
Grounding the work in SME knowledge, designing for familiarity, and testing iteratively paid off. Customers engaged with the flow straight away, and top-up requests that had previously gone through customer success by phone started to self-serve — taking a meaningful, recurring load off the team.
