Case Study
As a new startup our top priority was to find product market fit as fast & as cheaply as possible. We believed finance needs more honesty & people deserve more control.
🚀 Mission: To help people access the finance they need & make money management effortless, using automation & smart technology.
💆🏻♂️ Our focus: was to bring more transparency to the mortgage process by showing rates you can get before you apply and making it faster to complete.
🎯 Our first Goal: To on-board early users by creating an MVP app that would allow a consumer to compare & complete a mortgage application using just their phone, pitched as a broker tool.
👨🏻💻 My Role: Strategy, Research, Art Direction, Branding, UX & UI Design, Prototyping.
🤜🏻💥🤛🏻 Team: CEO, Product Director, Project Manager, 3 Engineers, 2 Designers, Writer.
We found mortgage applications long, inefficient and old, with paperwork that made the whole experience slow frustrating & left people feeling in the dark.
Solution:
We decided to focus on solving this in a single view, allowing the customer to see how their application was progressing as well as access all the documents & information from one place.
We found that during a mortgage application a customer had to provide documents by either scanning or taking photos & sending over by email, a file upload website or even by fax machine 🤷🏻♂️
Solution:
The app acts as an online portal that the consumer, broker & lender can all access & see all the documents. The consumer can upload any required documents straight from within the app, either as a photo or as a file, where it can be instantly viewed & verified.
Most comparison websites show you products very fast, but aren’t very accurate. It’s not until you do an application that you’ll see what you’re eligible for and what it will cost, leaving you to start another application from the beginning. We wanted to flip this on its head.
Solution:
We only wanted to show consumers products and prices they could actually get. We found if we got the consumer to do a soft credit search upfront, we would have enough information to know what products they were eligible for without impacting their financial health. We were able to incentivise this by creating a feature called “Money Health Score” where we could also provide hints and tips to improve their financial future.
Now we know the customer and the products they can get, we were able to check prices across the entire market in real time, notifying the customer of any new rates & prices when they became available, meaning they will never be on an old or expensive product ever again. We expanded this to include energy, where the consumer could add an already existing policy to the app.
The brand had to feel friendly & provide confidence, so we decided to go for an organic flowing shape for the icon, with a font that had a sense of urgency & strength, whilst having futuristic link back to the technology underneath. With 2 phrases that lead the design process “The Future of Money” & “Seriously Friendly Finance”. We wanted to position ourselves as a top consumer brand within the Financial industry, up there with other top UK brands like Monzo and Revolut.
I started by breaking down competitors products & market positioning. During this phase I also worked as UX, feature and product researcher.
I lead the UX process, including wire framing the entire lifecycle of the product.
Testing journeys along the way, using a “lean” cycle within our team, but as part of a bigger agile development process.
Creating designs and a theme that fit the phrase “Seriously Friendly Finance.”
Built a working prototype for a pitch to Tesco bank based in the UK, who offer a range of personal banking which would suit the companies mission, hoping to bring them on board to offer credit card products through the app.
Tesco Bank, UK