Lendumo self-service user portal
I was responsible for a complete redesign of the self-service user portal for Lendumo, a multi-million dollar lending company. It’s a large and complicated project with multiple user flows. This project required careful planning, execution, and close collaboration between our product team, engineering team, and me.
Role
UX designer, illustrator, user tester, UX researcher
Deliverables
UX Research, wireframes, high-fidelity prototype, design system, user testing plan and execution
Date
Sept 2020-Mar 2021
Project overview
Cross-departmental collaboration
User Research Summary
During foundational UX research, I interviewed our users and customer service agents, conducted log analysis, competitive audit, and sent out a user survey to help us create personas, problem statements, and discover potential pain points.
- Log Analysis
- SmartLook
- Google Analytic
- Interviews
- Customers
- Agents
- Survey
- Competitive Audit
Personas & Problem Statements
Pain Points
Ideate: Wireframes
I started the ideation process by creating paper wireframes. Paper wireframes allow me to quickly sketch my ideas on paper. I then created digital wireframes and presented them to the stakeholders. I also used the wireframes to discuss design feasibility with the engineering team and help the product team plan and strategize.
Early Visual Design & Design System Concepts
High-fidelity Prototype
Responsive design with clear and simple navigation
The new design’s navigation is simple with only 4 main options on the account home. I ensured that all clickable elements are recognizable with consistent icons, colors, and appropriate labels. The design is also fully responsive with a mobile-first approach.
Online payment
One of the biggest pain points is that the old portal doesn’t have an online payment feature. The new portal allows our users to schedule a principal paydown and a payoff, pay for missed payments, and check the payoff amount.
We ensure that the online payment user flow is simple and quick. The new design could take users less than one minute to schedule a payment while it usually takes them approximately 10-20 minutes on the phone, not including the wait time.
Rewards program
Lendumo often offers reward points to customers to promote brand loyalty. However, users mentioned that the old rewards redemption flow was confusing. The new design displays users’ points balance on the Redeem page, and will always have the unredeemable rewards disabled (when users don’t have enough points to redeem certain rewards)
Usability testing with interactive prototype
I validated the designs by testing the hi-fi prototype with 128 Lendumo customers. The participants completed four tasks followed by qualitative and quantitative questions. I then analyzed the findings and iterated the designs based on the participants’ feedback.
Design iteration: Easier navigation from the Notification Center
One of the feedback we received from our participants is that they wish it was easier to navigate from the Notification Center to the page that requires their attention. Based on the feedback, I added a call to action button to the applicable notifications to improve the navigation.
Design iteration: Users are able to review payment information before submit a payment
One of the feedback we received from our participants is that they wish it was easier to navigate from the Notification Center to the page that requires their attention. Based on the feedback, I added a call to action button to the applicable notifications to improve the navigation.
Accessibility Considerations
The original design had orange gradient as the header’s background which doesn’t have high enough contrast as recommended by WCAG. I updated the color to dark graphite and reviewed every page and component to ensure that our design follows the WCAG guidelines (level AA.)
- Contrast Ratio
- Image alt-text
- Text Spacing
- Target size
- Sufficient labels
- Navigation focus
- Clear error message and indicator
- Add tooltip & popover as needed
Design Handoff
- Help product managers define
- Use cases
- Known/potential edge cases
- Requirements & Criteria
- Prepare and package
- Assets
- Prototype with detailed comments
- Design system & guidelines
- Pre-launch QA
- Post-launch QA
Evaluation & impacts
- Customer portal engagement rate increased by 252%
- From 19% to 67%
- It is now over 80% in 2023
- Customer inbound call rate decreased by 24%
- From 64% to 49% (beat the 50% goal)
- 47% decrease in payment related calls
- Rewards program engagement rate increased by 111%
- From 9% to 19%
- Net promoter score increased by 17%
(Comparing data from Dec 2020 to Oct 2021.)
