Fintech · Micro-lending · Credit building · B2C · Financial inclusion
Digital micro-lender helping underbanked consumers build and improve credit
COMPANY
Oakam
ROLE
Lead Product Designer
EXPERTISE
UX/UI Design
YEAR
2024
Read
6 mins
Project description
Oakam is a digital micro-lender focused on giving underbanked, overlooked consumers a way onto and up the credit ladder. As Lead Product Designer, I owned the complete design lifecycle for their lending product — from discovery and research through delivery and optimisation — redesigning the customer borrowing journey to improve usability, accessibility, and conversion, while introducing scalable UX and UI standards across the product ecosystem.
Challenge
New customers applying for their first loan needed a fast, trustworthy path through approval — financial need is often urgent, and a slow or confusing process directly costs the business applicants. That urgency sat alongside a stricter constraint: standing out in a fiercely competitive micro-lending market required more than a workable flow, while every design decision still had to satisfy FCA requirements for responsible lending and avoid pushing users toward debt they couldn't manage.
Research
Research started with existing internal documentation before moving into market analysis, competitor benchmarking, and user feedback — including Trustpilot, used specifically to understand how users already felt about the product in the market. Persona work, informed by industry reports and gathered insights, sharpened who the design was actually solving for. Across a mobile-first product built in Flutter for iOS and Android, the clearest problems were structural: an application that took too long, questions that weren't intuitive, and technical glitches — together driving a 37% drop-off rate.
Persona
The target user was defined through persona work grounded in industry reports and direct feedback rather than assumption — someone applying for their first loan, under real time pressure, needing to feel guided and safe sharing financial information rather than just processed quickly.
Process
With the drop-off problem clearly identified, the response was to redesign the Wave Zero journey from the flow up — mapped collaboratively in Miro rather than jumping straight to UI. The goal was a more segmented, user-friendly onboarding rather than a single long form. Once wireframes for the new flow were ready, they went to stakeholders for approval before any visual design work began — keeping direction validated early rather than discovered late.
User flow
The application was broken into manageable, clearly bounded steps rather than one continuous form, with the ability to save progress and return later — a deliberate accommodation for a process that often requires digging up banking details or supporting documents mid-application. The flow also had to branch by outcome: applicants heading toward approval needed a different path than those facing rejection, who needed a clear route into appeals or providing further information rather than a dead end.
Design thinking
Structure alone wasn't enough for a lending product — tone mattered just as much. Messaging throughout the app was written to feel friendly and reassuring rather than transactional, aimed at helping users feel guided and secure sharing sensitive financial information, in line with FCA expectations around responsible lending communication.
Implementation
A prototype from the initial UI design went into user testing with eight participants, split between those likely to be approved and those facing rejection, run with support from a colleague in HR. The main finding: even users who found the journey intuitive still experienced it as long. That fed directly into a round of targeted changes — sliders replacing typed numerical input, questions rephrased for shorter answers, a document scanner to autofill personal data from ID, pre-written response options for one-tap answers, and face identification to speed up verification and cut waiting time on loan decisions.
Solution
Four things anchored decisions throughout: user-centricity — grounding every choice in persona work and direct feedback rather than assumption; friction reduction — minimizing typing, breaking the form into manageable steps, letting users save and return; trust through tone — friendly, reassuring language rather than transactional, especially where sensitive financial data was involved; and regulatory alignment built in, not bolted on — FCA requirements shaped how the flow communicated risk and consent, not just what data it collected.
Visual design
The final Wave Zero design spans over 90 screens, built for consistency at that scale rather than one-off polish. Core interface work centred on the friction-reducing changes testing surfaced: sliders in place of numeric typing, a document scanner for ID-based autofill, pre-written response options for one-tap answers, and visual progress indicators to make a long process feel finite rather than open-ended.
Calendar Integration
Seamless integration with popular calendar platforms such as Google Calendar and Outlook, ensuring synchronized scheduling across devices.
Personalization
Customizable settings allow users to tailor scheduling preferences and priorities to their unique needs
Outcome
Wave Zero shipped as a 90+ screen redesign of Oakam's loan application flow, built for consistency at that scale rather than a set of one-off screens. The core numbers moved directly: drop-off fell from 37% to 18%, and the application itself came down to roughly 3–5 minutes from what had been a noticeably longer, more protracted process. Streamlined onboarding also lifted registration — more prospective applicants completed sign-up rather than abandoning partway through — and breaking the questionnaire into shorter segments with visual progress indicators increased the number of applications completed end-to-end, which in turn contributed to a higher share of loans actually being approved.
The appeals and reconsolidation journey mattered here too: for applicants who weren't approved outright, having a real path to provide more information or appeal — rather than a dead end — proved to be one of the features that mattered most to registered users.
Consistency at scale
Wave Zero wasn't a single flow — it was segmented onboarding, document scanning, sliders, appeals, and rejection paths, all needing to feel like one continuous product rather than a stitched-together set of screens. Rather than a standalone branded system built in isolation, I introduced scalable UX and UI standards as the flow grew past 90 screens, so new sections stayed consistent with what already existed instead of each becoming its own one-off design decision. That discipline is part of what let the redesign hold together at the scale it reached.
Reflection
The clearest lesson was how directly user testing paid off — even a flow that tested as intuitive still felt too long to users, and that single insight drove the sliders, scanner, and one-tap responses that ultimately moved the numbers. Fintech lending adds constraints most products don't carry — every simplification had to hold up against FCA requirements, not just usability goals — which made tone and trust-building as important as the functional changes. Committing to iteration over a single big redesign, and staying user-centred throughout rather than only at the start, was what let the numbers move as far as they did.