CredAvenue

Unified lending infrastructure and online marketplace for all debt requirements.

May 2020 - Nov 2021

New UI Concept Prototype

Head of Design

Reporting to the CEO, and last 6 mo to the CTO

Re-structured, led, guided the team of Product Designers, Researchers, Design Systems, UX Writing, and Marketing.
Worked closely with Marketing, Product, Engineering and other Cross-functions to ensure consistent Voice and Tone across all Digital channels.
Defined the user experience vision, and strategy. Established the Design direction along with component guidelines.
Established process and culture across functions to solve problems, by having a user-centered mindset.
Associated with Stakeholders to validate the design initiatives to see if we align with the Org Goals.
Was engaged mostly in Conceptualising New Ideas which helped Product and Business to move the needle forward.

How it all started...

After 5 years, I decided to leave Chargebee. Leading the Interface & Design Systems, I was involved in almost all projects. That's when I realised to work with different people and challenges to enrich my professional and personal life.

Early 2020 CredAvenue started to invest in Design and User Experience. Few interactions with the CEO and VP of Engineering helped me to understand how design can help to drive their business. This is when I took the opportunity of building the Design team which worked collaboratively with all other functions to deliver user-centered financial experiences across all digital channels.

I was prepared for the challenge

Understood how the team’s performance and culture influenced the Design so far.

No Collaboration No Time management No Quality consistency No Business understanding No Practiced workflow

Uncertainty around teams... Mission, Vision, and Values

Jotted down the Design Team Values
Filling the team with Right People and Structure
Build Alliance with Cross-Function’s to collaborate and empathise better.
Speak one Common Language across teams which should reduce back and forth discussions

Filling the gaps

Continuously learning to build a better team. Before that, I'd like to apply the list of things I learned over the years to categorize the teammates we need.

🖥️ Product Design

🔎 User Research

🌎 Communication Design

Laying foundation

Based on the learnings I was able to identify the right kind of team structure which will solve all our immediate problems

Structuring the Team

Understood that we can’t solve this problem for the future. Nothing is perfect. I’d like to choose a structure which will solve immediate problems.

Interface Design: We lack in bringing good visual quality to Interfaces. We need people who could possess UX abilities for an enterprise product. To improve the interaction part we need people who could be articulating flows with the required interaction. And how they collaborate with engineers to deliver an experience.

User Research: Need someone who could fit user research in our design process. And also use the right methodologies in different scenarios.

UX Writing: I see writing is also design. Without good copy, we cannot deliver the right experience the user would expect. This goes handy for every single project we deliver.

As a Design lead what should I do to help the team to grow along with the organization. And also play a role in delegating responsibilities, listening, helping around conflicts, and collaborating between roles and teams.

Based on our disciplines we would want to have this kind of work timeline with other teams.

This way Technology started to inform design and Design started to challenge technology.

Hiring

Screening candidates

Conducting phone and in-person interviews

Reaching out and meeting potential candidates

Team Management

Weekly 1:1 meetings

Performance reviews

Conflict resolution

Design Direction

Critiquing each designers work

Illustrating a vision for the future

Creating design systems

Team Operations

Work Prioritization

Weekly standup, team critique, and other structural meetings

Working on messy design projects

Solutioning

Set design review days on your team’s calendar and invite specific people to participate

Your org chart is not a list of names; it’s a group of potential allies. Get to know them.

Post your work in an accessible space. Talk about your work and answer questions in a company channel.

Solicit feedback every step of the way. This isn’t designed by committee, but good ideas—and constructive criticism—can come from anywhere.

Find opportunities to educate your company about design (UX progressives, film screenings, office hours.

Investing time to document decisions and thought processes every time while collaborating.

Building a Design System to standardize components across platforms to iterate faster.

UI guidelines and Principle backed Component Library.

Consistent cadence throughout the project lifecycle

The Result

In my first few months, I was closely working with the leadership and teammates to understand the Product requirements to derive a Design Vision that will help us to be more productive and collaborative.

This time helped me to understand the real problems the team faced. I could sense an urgency of help required at that time when people started to trust me, and share their thoughts on people, culture, and process.

After a few months I started to see good progress in teams collaboration and productivity

As a first step, we’d want to improve the Customer Onboarding which was a long-form with several questions. Quick iteration to the Onboarding flow will enable self-serve onboarding to the Borrowers and Investors.

User Flow Diagram

Revamping the current brand and product design layouts to align with Org expectations

Building a Design System for CredAvenue App and Marketing collaterals to ensure rapid iteration and standardise the quality of design elements. The component library will be backed by strong guidelines and principles

Revamped Concept collage

Design System

I was working with the Interface Design team very closely in getting the Component Library done and used by Engineers and Designers.

Everyday discussions with the team helped me to orchestrate the Design System implementation, and its roadmap better.

Focused initially on building the basic components and the style library up and running. In that way the product started showing consistency for the first time.

Didn't just focus on building a component, but we also gave more importance to the guidelines and the principles which we wrote for every component.

Front-end engineers understood the impact of components in their workflow helped them in saving more time, also started showing more importance to the Ui Quality.

CredAvenue Design System.pdf96041.7KB