LendUp is a mission-driven fintech company that puts people on a path to better financial health through accessible, quality credit products including short-term loans, credit cards (now a part of Mission Lane), and online education videos.
When I joined in June 2014, LendUp was an early stage company with ~30 employees and had launched loans in a couple of states. We rapidly expanded to dozens of states and launched credit cards in 2015 across the country. Our Design team grew from 2 to 7 members who I collaborated with on both products (loans and cards), running Design sprints, understanding our customers through research, and improving our internal Design process. My core work was leading areas of the Credit Card product experience, shaping the visual identity of LendUp, and contributing to marketing and internal initiatives.
The Credit Card Experience
Brand and initial design
In 2014 we carved off a small team of specialists, not unlike a startup within a startup. My role began with the visual identity and logo (we didn’t know at the time if this product would be standalone or a part of LendUp), then I designed the marketing website including the front-end in HTML and CSS, then I crafted credit card plastic concepts to production-ready artwork. The L Card was born.
Product-market fit
In 2015 I designed the first LendUp Card mobile app for iOS alongside our newest addition to the team, Ryan Varick — we tag-teamed the app with our complementary skills. From that initial design we ran GV-style sprints (with the Google Ventures Design partners, then adopted them in-house) to figure out product market fit on various differentiated features through the lens of our mission. We aimed to learn what resonated with the test participants—our target customers. We distilled the findings and feedback that ultimately informed multiple rounds of iterations. Over the next couple of years we shipped plenty of improvements for our tens of thousands of customers and some of the differentiated work is still churning behind the scenes. Today it’s part of a vision that lives under Mission Lane, a company that split off with folks from the LendUp Card team.
Servicing and payments experience, more branding and change
From the iOS L Card mobile app, we built the web experience, the Card dashboard. In the midst of this in late 2016 we brought on another partner bank with whom we launched another card, Arrow. I lead the visual identity of Arrow, crafted a sister brand system to the L Card, extended it to all of our materials and worked closely with the team on due diligence approvals to get Arrow Card to production. Shortly after this launch we welcomed Sarah Li to the Design team, who took over the native mobile domain. In late 2017, we updated our visual identity to better reflect the current multi-product status and growing vision of our company. We worked with a small design shop to come up with Upswing. During this time I worked to build out the payments experience on the Card dashboard while implementing the new Upswing identity to our UI as an updated system on React. I worked with my PED (product, engineering, design) team closely as the Design lead to build out the full payments experience including scheduling one-time and future payments, managing payments and bank accounts, auto pay, addressing all the happy-path, error and edge cases.
Revamped application flow
The credit card application flow at launch was not super great (as we rolled with MVP) so we undertook a revamp project in 2018, optimizing the conversion-funnel as well as the user experience. I led the Design of the project, updating the application with the new brand guides and redid the form patterns to be more clear, intuitive and smart, and support all of our use cases. I created docs that assessed areas of opportunity, risk, and did extensive competitive and design research on forms to achieve the best execution of design within the scope and requirements. I can chat more about the key areas addressed in interview settings. 🙂
More
Having spent 4.5 years at LendUp, I had the amazing opportunity of having tons of impact alongside a brilliant, dedicated and fun team and supportive manager. Outside of my core role in product design, I worked on a variety of needs from Design Ops to Marketing to Communications, and became the de facto designer to filter and delegate internal tasks.
Other highlights:
- Working on our Upswing brand system and communicating the upcoming changes to the company at All Hands meetings
- Ensuring employees had an easy resource to internal brand guidelines, logos, fonts, slide templates and assets
- Redoing our Loans direct mail campaigns which saw a huge lift in conversions
- Speaking directly with customers on research calls to hear them out, gain empathy, and share insights with the team
- Running with swag and signage projects, coordinating print production with vendors
- Templating fun social media graphics for our Communications team to use
- Designing OOH billboards and bus stop ads twice and scouting them in the wild
- Consulting on interior design for multiple office moves
- Creating compelling graphics to visually communicate our vision in fundraising pitch decks
- And of course collaborating with my favorite people on Design!
