Building a
Product
Suite - Lending
My Role
Lead Designer,
Lead Researcher
Duration
Planned - 9 months
Actual - 15 months
Design Team Size
4 (1 Lead designer,
2 Junior designers,
1 Researcher)
Key Responsibilities
Led the research and design
Facilitated workshops
Fostered collaboration among internal stakeholders and with external stakeholders (bank personnel)
Led the design execution process applying components based design
Collaborated with product management to shape the product roadmap from a design perspective
Problem Statement
Six separate credit tools, when presented individually, failed to offer a holistic view to customers and effectively showcase the values readily. As a result, sales team heavily relied on product managers to demonstrate products during sales, which negatively impacted product development. Most clients were non-tech folks, who found it challenging to interact with multiple products and finish a naturally connected use-case.
Goal
The primary objective was to build a single comprehensive credit product by integrating all credit relevant products. The integration should be meaningful, and the entire effort should significantly contribute to boost engagement, productivity, and efficiency, while simultaneously reducing reliance on customer support. The design should also aim at amplifying cross-selling and upselling opportunities.
What did we do?
The limitations of products, and the ‘long-term’ challenges was ambiguous. Facilitated workshops couple of times with all product owners / stakeholders
To understand various perspectives and expectations of product owners
Understand how efficiently products work independently / together
Define the construct of credit suite, and the benefits it has to offer
Given the fact that each product has its own roadmap with different priorities, it was challenging to get consistent efforts from all product teams, especially from the product managers.
Co-developed a communication protocol between various product teams that included a shared understanding on “Product scope, capabilities, limitations, etc” for Lending Suite.
To understand the limitations and opportunities, preferences, and pain points, we used co-creation workshops as and when needed with different groups. This helped with feature prioritization and developing a product road-map, thereby providing a feasible, and concrete construct for the Lending suite.
“Product owners, product managers and designers
at the workshop co-creating
the construct for the Lending suite”
Increased proximity for better clarity
We keenly co-located the design team with the product team, and ensured direct access to all key stakeholders. This proximity enabled rapid feedback loops, resulting in deeper insights into product requirements and integration points.
Building a cohesive ecosystem
Integrating disparate products into a comprehensive suite required meticulous design craftsmanship and high collaboration. Through relentless iteration and clear focus on the outcome, we designed a seamless experience, delivering a product that did the job.
Deployed a design system
Fast-tracked design with increased consistency, and decreased redundant efforts allowing the team to focus on solutions rather than screens.
A sample use case
Most of our product configuration could be done only in the backend by specialised product team and the product expert. Some products did have a preliminary / legacy UI to carry out the same. Despite the trainings and support materials, even the product team members refrained from making any changes to the configuration fearing even a simple mistake could lead to irreparable financial loss. The following drawbacks were observed:
The learning curve was steep for any new entrant
Undue time and effort of product expert being wasted in making simple changes
Delay in development and delivery
Considering the above pain points, the following key solutions were incorporated.
Implemented 'auto-save' to ensure users could recover their work and minimize information loss
Eliminated long forms, and designed a progressive form, which offered more clarity on ‘Where they are', and 'What next’
Through close user engagement and log review, pinpointed error prone areas and deployed solutions to prevent them
Introduced comments section to share quick review on configurations, collaborate, iterate and rectify errors.
Introduced 'role-based' access control to streamline operations and avoid accidental modifications
Designed an intuitive activity(audit)log to record, track and communicate the changes made by all the users
Made the table views customizable, and restructured filters to provide a comprehensive and meaningful view
Eliminated technical jargons with domain specific and relatable terms
Brought in ‘Contextual Help’, enabling users get immediate help from the right source
Impact
Our design-driven approach led to significant
improvements across various areas
The newly designed ‘Lending Suite’ achieved remarkable success and was well received among both existing and new customers.
Increased operational efficiency by minimum 30%
Significantly reduced dependency on the product team
Internal sales team, and external clients both found the suite to be “easy-to-use, intuitive, friendly, contextual”
Increased lead-to-conversion increased from 1:10 to 2:10, which for a B2B is a good outcome.
A quick snapshot of the Credit Program