While at Thinking Capital, there was always a big focus on producing new products. We didn't spend much time focused on creating products for existing customers. One of the things that were sorely lacking for our loan customer was an online financing portal. If customers wanted any information, they would call a support agent who would send them what they need. In July of 2019, I started working on designing a portal for our loan customer. We launched the portal in October of 2019 and had onboarded 1500 customers by the end of November.
Over the years, our loan customer base had surpassed that of the merchant cash advance product. Not having a portal had effects on both customer experience and support services. Here are some of the ways no online account affected our customers:
Designing the user experience began with defining a user journey. We wanted to map out all the possible routes based on the task at hand. It allowed us to explore alternative methods of the signup and password process with the development team. Once we established all the flows, I moved on to start Wireframes.
I started by creating some low-fi wireframes. It was a great tool to explore layouts quickly and outline all areas of the new portal.
The hi-fi wireframes are where I was able to add more detail to all the screens. This version allowed me to gather more contextual feedback on each section that would help me define the final vision of the portal.
Through our beta program, we gave a selection of customers early access to a version of the portal. We conducted phone interviews to gather meaningful feedback from various customers, which helped to improve our product.
Unfortunately, the project was cut shortly after delivering the second set of features, and all resources moved to another product.
For the new dashboard, we knew that if we wanted the grade to be useful, it had to get more granular. So made some changes on the back end to add + and - levels to each grade (A+, A, A-, B+, B, B-..etc). The changes we made would help the customer see their progress monthly.
Alongside their grade, every customer would see impact factors. We would rank them based on severity. Each impact factor would have a detailed summary that included what it means, what can be about it, and additional resources to help solve each issue.
