Quidcycle
QuidCycle
QuidCycle is a p2p lending platform which brings together investors and borrowers . Investors can “Be the Bank”, earning far higher returns. Borrowers can "Beat the Bank" by refinancing high interest credit cards and loans.
The Challenge
Redesign the whole Dashboard Experience both for Investors and Borrowers. This includes the Account Section and the whole registration process.
Research and Competitive Analysis
The research started by analysing some of the data already stored in our Database (demographics, emails ) and by getting in touch with our customers directly. Some of the customers were contacted by phone, some by emails and the insights were collected on a spreadsheet to highlight gain and pain points. I focused on looking at the value proposition of our competitors and the features offered by their dashboards . I also made some research on online forums to get a better understanding of the needs associated with the activity of investing and borrowing.
The competitors analysis helped me to get a better understanding of what our dashboard was missing and what could be improved in order deliver a better user experience.
Stakeholder Interviews
With the insights gathered from the competitive analysis I then moved on to organise meeting sessions with stake-holders directly or indirectly involved with activities related to our users. These sessions shaped a clearer picture of our users needs and the business requirements.
The extra value added by the people directly involved in the everyday communication with our customers helped me map the users tasks and also understand what content prioritise in the Information architecture.
This step was also very important as it highlighted how part of the Admin section had to be modified according to what we were actually improving on the users side.
User Journey
User Journey, user stories and user flows helped to understand the behaviours, attitudes, and pain points of our users. Breaking down the user journey into stories helped me understand the essential features needed by our Investors and Borrowers.
Borrowers Registration User Journey
Sitemap and User flows
With the insight gathered from the discovery phase I started creating the Sitemap. The information architecture was also informed by card-sorting sessions.
Sketching, Wireframing, Hi-Fi Designs
The sketching was done also involving other members of the team. At the end we all discussed potential solutions that informed the final design of our Dashboard. The final versions were then delivered with design specs to our developers.
Deliver and Conclusions
We released our Beta version of the website in September.
The results were more than satisfying .
By adding the possibility for Investors to withdraw money and reinvest at a different interest rate, Retention on the dashboard was consistently improved. Lenders started investing more and playing with their interest rate in order to find the best spot to get their investments matched instantly. The lack of such feature on the previous dashboard meant loosing all of these customers.
Our Customer service started receiving less than half of the calls they were receiving before the release of the new dashboard. These calls were mainly around Investments performances and frustration around the lack of info shown on the previous dashboard . The calls to our customer service were now all from users who didn’t yet have access to the Beta.
Engagement with the platform improved in general thanks also to the implementation of a Secondary Market where investors could sell their investments to other Investors.
Registration drop-off rates were minimised thanks to the implementation of a better strategy to gather customers info . This meant reducing the number of questions asked and using info received directly from the credit check and credit Id process.
We're now working on a second iteration based on the results of the usability testing and on data collected from Hotjar.