RewardRate Website & Application Journey
Background
RewardRate is a subprime lending startup offering personal and guarantor loans with a unique rewards system; customers received interest rate reductions for maintaining timely payments. As a sister company to the UK's largest guarantor lender, RewardRate leveraged existing market data and user behaviour insights to accelerate their market entry.
The Challenge
Launch a complete digital lending platform within tight deadlines using Scaled Agile methodology. The project required designing both the brand website and multi-product application journeys while ensuring regulatory compliance and optimal user experience for a vulnerable customer demographic.
My Role
Led end-to-end UX/UI design for the website and application flows, collaborating closely with Marketing, Product, and Compliance teams throughout the development cycle.
Process & Approach
Research & Discovery
We partnered with a financial advice charity to recruit participants matching our target personas or had experience of recently looking for a loan. Multiple research sessions were conducted over four weeks, uncovering key insights:
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Users wanted flexibility, without being penalised
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Users wanted to be in control and kept in the loop
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Users wanted real human support when they needed help
Website Design & Development
By collaborating closely with the SEO team and using analytics from the sister company, we were able to define a sitemap that was optimised for SEO and user behaviour. The structure was then mocked up as low-fidelity wireframes and iterated on to ensure the journeys were streamlined and met the various user needs. We worked closely with the Marketing team for this process with regular feedback cycles.
A third-party agency built the site on Umbraco to enable future content management for the Marketing team without developer dependency.
Application Journey Design
We designed end-to-end journeys for multiple customer types (borrowers and guarantors) for multiple loan products, with additional variations for acquisition channel. We prioritised an intuitive design that was simple to complete and easy to understand, considering the sensitive nature of financial applications for users.
As a heavily regulated business sector, the Compliance team were a key stakeholder throughout this project. We managed this by having regular check-ins as well as longer workshops to review the wider user journeys.
We started from low-fidelity wireframes, progressing through to a high-fidelity prototype.
Testing & Validation
We worked with a market research company to support user testing the website and application journeys. 14 sessions were conducted with the target demographic across various devices. The resulting findings were that users found the journey easy to navigate and flow through, but often found specific copy elements confusing.
We were able to take these findings, resolve the friction points and update the journey quickly before our launch date.
Post-Launch Monitoring and Optimisation
We regularly monitored the site and application performance using heatmaps, user session recordings and website analytics. Bi-weekly iteration cycles were implemented to ensure continuous improvement throughout the journeys. I led the ‘Voice of Customer’ initiative, where user feedback was taken at multiple points throughout the whole user experience to inform and lead our improvement backlog.
