Figma
Google Suite
Jira
Adobe CC
8 Weeks
User Research
Prototyping
UI Design (Dashboards)
Our stakeholder had one regret about his wedding: that he had not allocated more money for a professional photographer in his wedding budget. Had he known at the time, he felt he would have considered a small loan to pay for a professional on his big day and wanted us to design a product that would solve that demand.
Working in a team of 5, we set out to research both loans and wedding planning. How do people plan, budget, and pay for their big day? How do they track and pay off their loans? Would couples be interested in taking out small loans to pay for certain vendors?
We started by researching how couples planned their weddings and what methods they used to keep track of their budgets.
Average budget of a 2021 wedding reception
Increase their initial budget during the planning process.
Paid by couples themselves
We interviewed 3 people, who had recently been married, about their experience budgeting for their wedding. Overwhelmingly, budget was a big issue.
"We had met one photographer that we loved, but they were $3k over our budget."
~Patrick, 34
"I would delegate more tasks if I had the extra money and budget."
~Brunella, 29
“To me, I look at the numbers and I’m like, “What?” … We’re making a lot of estimates right now.”
~Scarlett, 34
We sent out a survey to our friends and family to learn more about loans. Over half had applied online through a banking establishment with the majority of their experience being in student and auto loans.
Millennial age group (25-40 yrs old)
Took out loans for <$100k, student loans being the most common
Applied due to lack of funds
We organized our insights into an Empathy Map and, overwhelmingly, budget dominated every user's wedding plans. These tight budgets were at the forethought of every user's decisions when planning. It would decide whether they could afford a professional photographer or if they would rely on their friends to take pictures with their phones.
Our target users would be young couples, paying for their own wedding, and planning it within a tight budget.
Through our interviews, we discovered that venues are the first stop for most couples' planning. Venues then have other vendors, whom they have their own relationships with, and can then suggest to couples. So venues would be the starting point for our product. With this in mind, we designed a story that would address that ideal process.
Based on our empathy map, we gathered up potential features that would solve our user's pain points and make applying for a loan as quick and painless as possible.
Our 3 priorities for the product would be:
Our product would be fairly simple: a point-of-sale loan application that is managed by the vendor.
In our competitive analysis, we looked at user flows for regular banking loans and spoke with a fintech professional to make sure we understood the loan process in general.
Our product would follow this basic flow of applying and paying off loans, with OTC providing the funds to merchants and clients paying off the loans to OTC.
Through our interviews we discovered that venues always carry some sort of mobile device, usually an iPad or tablet, when walking clients through their properties. This is used as a sales device to promote their venue, which fit in line perfectly with our needs, so the app would be designed with tablets in mind.
Since long forms were one of the big pain points from our research, we broke up each form to no more than 6 inputs per page and incorporated a wizard so a user's expectations would be set from the start. While this wouldn't necessarily shorten the forms themselves, this design allows users to digest the amount of information quickly and set their expectation for the remainder of the form.
Each dashboard would have the same basic layout with loan payments being the main focus for clients and viewing loan history for merchants.
Because the loan had to be introduced at the merchant level, we needed to ensure that a client could not potentially access sensitive information. A merchant would launch the Present Dashboard, which would only contain the application and an FAQ page, and hand their tablet to a client. If a client accidentally hit the "Return" button from here, a PIN pad would open. This ensures that the merchant's loan history is hidden from clients and merchants could quickly log back into their dashboard rather than re-entering their password.
Our group of 4 broke up and moodboarded our dream weddings (don't tell my bf) before coming together and deciding on our design system. We all loved light, natural colors and decided on using purple as our brand color.
We set up our design system using Google fonts Playfair Display for the headers, Work Sans for the body, and varying shades of purple for our main colors.
We kept the design minimalist with simple lines for the inputs and wizard.
We wanted to make payments the top priority for the clients, so put a calendar with due dates highlighted and an option to make a next payment at the top, before navigating to individual loans.
For the merchant dashboards, we added summary cards for each venue so merchant's can know at a glance how well they are doing with OTC. We reworded the application launcher to "Launch Application Dashboard" after usability tests showed the language was confusing.
Since merchants had to have management over individual applications, we added further pages so merchants could view individual applications and send any necessary messaging to clients.
Our application dashboard got an upgrade with a new background.
Check out our finished product below or on Figma!
(Sorry mobile users! You will need to use the Figma link.)
