Personal loan app
Client- Tata Capital
Year- 2018
Role- Design Lead
Teammate- Aboli Ballal (Visual Designer)
Skills Used- User Interviews, Competitive Analysis, Personas, Sketches, Wireframes, Screen Flow, Moodboard, Visual Design, Design Specs.
OVERVIEW
Tata Capital came to us to digitise their personal loan application process. For the customer facing journeys, they wanted a hybrid mobile app that could be used for both iOS and Android.
Ernst and Young (EY) managed the process from TATA’s side. I led the design efforts and did the UX part. I then worked with a visual designer for the visual/UI design. We completed the design phase in 4 weeks.
PROCESS
UNDERSTAND- Met all the stakeholders across TATA and EY to understand the loan process. The business analyst from EY prepared a process flowchart which I later used as a reference to get started during the design phase. I also got the requirements from TATA’s branding team.
RESEARCH- This phase mostly consisted of competitive analysis where I looked at the current loan apps in the market such as India Bull’s Dhani, Early Salary, Bajaj Finserv, etc. I worked closely with the Business Analyst from EY who headed this.
I was told that the target audience is 18-60 year olds with the millennials (20-35 years old) being the biggest group of users. Keeping that in mind, I spoke to a 5 millennials and came up with user personas to understand my app’s users better and design for them.
UX DESIGN- I started my design process by first understanding and laying out the content for the screens. Once I felt the content was in a good shape, I started designing the user experience and interactions with continuous feedback from our stakeholders. I went through almost 30 iterations due to changing requirements at the field level to arrive at the final set of wireframes.
VISUAL DESIGN- I studied TATA’s branding guidelines and guided the visual designer. We explored many illustrations options before arriving at the concept of an assistant which we felt embodied TATA’s brand values.
Take 1: A family oriented approach which indicates a traditional interaction within the family around education / travel. It seemed to indicate dependency whereas we wanted to convey the product’s ability to empower individuals to achieve their dreams.
Take 2: A finance guru who understands all the needs and will help fulfill them. However he seemed to lack the warmth that we wanted to convey to the customer to form a bond.
Take 3: An independent personal financial assistant who understands your needs and effectively converses and gently guides you throughout your journey.
We were then asked to explore the option of having a virtual assisted journey where a customer could complete the loan application through natural language and conversation. However, this idea was not possible in the project timeframe.
TATA rejected the idea of an assistant and asked us to explore colour options outside of TATA’s brand colours of blue and lime. We came up with other colour options and recommended the dark blue with lime as it was still within TATA’s colour family.
