Problem
Millions of people in the U.S. are excluded from traditional credit systems, limiting their ability to buy cars or homes. Despite being financially responsible, many are left out due to lack of credit history or other systemic barriers.
We weren’t just designing a product — we were introducing a new financial concept to a market unfamiliar with it. The model, based on a Brazilian-style consortium or “savings club,” had no precedent in the US. Our challenge was to overcome user skepticism, communicate the value proposition clearly (“Smart funding for smart people“), and create a seamless digital experience that built trust.
The Savings Club aimed to disrupt that by offering a more accessible, community-based model — but it was a new concept for the U.S. market, and clarity was our biggest hurdle.
My Role & Approach
As the Lead Designer, I worked closely with product, engineering, marketing, and stakeholders across the company. My responsibilities included:
Defining the design and research strategy
Conducting foundational user research, including Jobs To Be Done
Leading vision workshops and aligning on business outcomes
Mapping the end-to-end user journey
Ideating, wireframing, prototyping, and running usability tests
Designing and documenting the UI across platforms
Setting up post-launch measurement and iteration workflows
Discovery & Research
We kicked off with a deep discovery phase to understand our users and align stakeholders.
Highlights from Research:
Target: Ages 25–35 in Texas, looking to own a car.
Barriers: High inflation, lack of credit, confusing dealership processes.
Opportunities: Users were open to saving-based financing — if explained clearly.
Stakeholder Alignment
We kicked off the project with workshops to define the product vision, business goals, risks, and user hypotheses. These sessions helped align the team and define clear design objectives.
Understanding the User
Through qualitative interviews and JTBD analysis, we found that our target users felt anxious about credit scores, overwhelmed by dealership processes, and confused by hidden fees. They wanted transparency, flexibility, and control.
These insights revealed that the biggest friction point was unfamiliarity. We weren’t just building a product — we were teaching a new way to buy a car.
Opportunity Framing
We mapped out the desired user journey — from first exposure to full adoption — and identified trust-critical moments. This helped us define the MVP scope and prioritize features that directly addressed core user pain points while supporting lead generation and conversion.
JTBD helped us move beyond what users said they wanted and focus on what was driving their decisions and frustrations. That led us to core design principles: simplicity, transparency, and control.
Journey Mapping & UX Flows
Mapping the User Journey
To better understand how customers discover and interact with the product, we created a customer journey map. This helped us identify improvement opportunities and challenges throughout the user’s experience — from first contact to long-term engagement.
We focused especially on the consideration and loyalty stages, which surfaced issues related to comprehension, trust, and clarity of next steps. This gave us a high-level view of the critical touchpoints where we could enhance the user experience.
Designing the Flow
With a better understanding of the journey, I mapped detailed user flows — from the landing page through sign-up, onboarding, and app engagement. Particular attention was paid to moments of high drop-off, such as the financial simulation and signup forms.
This flow mapping gave structure to our design process, helping us define the information architecture and ensure every interaction felt logical and reassuring.
Before sketching screens, it was key to understand how users move through the system and what emotions they experience at each step. Mapping flows early helped prevent costly redesigns later.
Sketching
Early Exploration
We started with low-fidelity wireframes to explore ideas quickly and cheaply. These focused on core flows like onboarding, product explanation, simulation, and application.
These early drafts helped:
Align stakeholders around the user journey
Validate key interaction models
Refine our value messaging before investing in visuals
Prototyping & Testing
We built clickable prototypes to test comprehension of the financial model, usability of flows, and clarity of key messages. User feedback directly shaped copy, layout, and interaction patterns.
Starting low-fi helped us learn fast. Sketches were less about visuals and more about testing assumptions and simplifying complexity.
UI Design & Visual Language
Once we had validated the core experience and flows, we moved on to crafting the final visual design in Figma. Our goal was to build an interface that clearly reflected the brand’s promise: “Smart funding for smart people.”
We began with competitive analysis and visual benchmarks to understand how traditional banks and fintechs in the US communicated trust, clarity, and credibility. While our product introduced a completely new concept to the market, we deliberately leaned into familiar financial design patterns to create a sense of recognition and reliability from the very first impression.
To guide our interface design, we drew from systems like Material Design and NNS, adapting them to our context with a strong focus on clarity, accessibility, and consistency. We created a design system with well-defined tokens and components that allowed for scalable development and coherent branding across all touchpoints.
I designed assets for the responsive website, landing pages, and the mobile app, ensuring that the experience felt seamless, intentional, and trustworthy at every stage of the journey.
Visual design wasn’t just about aesthetics — it was a strategic tool to communicate credibility and simplicity in an unfamiliar financial model. Every element, reinforced clarity and the user was in control.
Post-Launch & Iteration
Analytics & Feedback
Once launched, we tracked key metrics like conversion rates, engagement, task completion, and bounce rates. We also collected qualitative feedback from users and support channels.
Continuous Improvement
We iterated quickly based on what we learned. For example, we noticed users dropping off at a certain form field, so we reworded the label and added contextual help — drop-off rates went down immediately.
Defining success metrics early gave us a clear lens to evaluate what was working and what wasn’t. We weren’t guessing — we were measuring.
Outcomes
75.6% increase in conversion rate for acquisition contracts
42% reduction in support call volume
34.3% growth in the user waiting list
66% increase in app downloads after design updates
32.4% reduction in homepage bounce rate
Reflections
This project reinforced the importance of designing with users, not just for them. Grounding our decisions in real user behavior and market context helped us build something that felt trustworthy — even when the concept itself was unfamiliar. Leading this project also reminded me of the value of structured collaboration, clear documentation, and constant iteration.
It wasn’t just about shipping a product. It was about making something people could believe in. 💡
