-White.svg)
INTRODUCTION
Defining the design language for a fast-evolving fintech startup
I spent three years as a leader within the design and product team at West Creek Financial, a fintech startup that provides tech-enabled customer financing to retailers around the country. Our product was used by over 10,000 B2B clients, with over 1 million customer purchases financed. With a leadership largely comprised of Capital One alumni, there was a strong focus on enterprise-level work and data-driven decisions.
I worked closely with an agile engineering team to ideate, develop and realize new features, and helped guide both the user experience and look and feel of the website and web application.
USER ONBOARDING
Reducing the user onboarding and training process from days to hours
The first major UX project I was involved with was streamlining the B2B training and onboarding process. The legacy training system was largely carried out by in-person training representatives, and relied on schedules aligning and carving out a few hours of an already-busy sales staff's day. Often the training and user onboarding process would take weeks due to its manual and synchronous nature.
I worked with the engineering, training and compliance teams to develop an asynchronous, fully in-app video training system which allowed new users to onboard and train within an hour. Users were quizzed after watching the video to ensure they were aware of all important points, and they were ready to begin submitting applications in a fraction of the time of the old system.
I helped to develop the script, produced screen recordings, and cut and edited the final training video that was used within the application. I also worked closely with engineering to monitor and make updates to the training system when new features were added that would be incorporated into the video.
NEW USER FLOW
Rebuilding the user experience
As West Creek shifted its focus to offer a wider range of financing options, the product design team took the opportunity to streamline and enhance the user flow, and refresh the application visuals from the ground up.
We conducted user research in the form of user interviews, live user monitoring via Fullstory and Hotjar, and user feedback through UserTesting. We identified several possible ways to make the application process easier and more intuitive, including the addition of a progress indicator. We found that this simple addition distilled the application into a series of brief steps which made the application feel more lightweight and gave the user a sense of ease.
Another very important factor was the consideration of multiple end states for the user. It was incredibly important that the user's financing options were laid out intuitively and simply, to eliminate confusion and to make the user feel confident in selecting an option. We accomplished this through a complete rewrite of the UX language to a more colloquial and friendly tone.
We created a full prototype redesign to match an early brand concept, and generally brightened up to give the user a sense of clarity and trust. We had received feedback from past users that the dark West Creek UI was not inviting, and seemed almost immature in comparison with the quality of our product, so we chose to lighten the UI and limit the use of color.
WEBSITE ENHANCEMENTS
Modernizing and redesigning the West Creek web presence
In addition to the application itself, I was also responsible for several enhancements and feature additions and a complete visual redesign of the public-facing website.
In order to streamline the B2B funnel and provide a more succinct introduction to our product, several segmented landing pages were created. This allowed us to speak more directly to specific customer segments, and describe the product in a way that made more immediate sense to customers from different industries and backgrounds.
Landing pages were wireframed, tested with key stakeholders both internally and externally, and eventually implemented on the live site. Fullstory and Google Analytics were used to measure traffic and effectiveness, and A/B testing was used to further refine the design and content once live.
In addition to a more streamlined funnel, we also created a repository of marketing resources for our business partners to better sell our product to their customers. This idea was the result of user interviews and was identified as an opportunity to provide more clarity about our product to new users. Things like brand assets, social media banners, ecommerce buttons and banners, email templates, videos, and suggested content were housed in a knowledge base that was accessible to authenticated users.
