YouLend is a financial technology company which provides fast and flexible loans to small and medium businesses. By partnering with e-commerce platforms and payment service providers, YouLend can offer loans to both physical and digital merchants in a matter of minutes. Merchants then repay flexibly as a fixed percentage of their future sales. When business is good, repayments are high, when income decreases, repayments are low.
I've helped YouLend on 3 distinctive projects in 2022. Redesigning their main application journey (used by thousands of merchants to apply for a loan) and two dashboards helping both merchants and partner brands keep track of repayments.
Redesigning the application journey
YouLend offers a white-label set of interfaces that allows partner brands such as Paymentsense or eBay to offer funding to their merchants. When YouLend started to partner with larger, design-driven brands such as Shopify, the importance of design became immediate and they contacted me to redesign the main application journey, used by thousands of merchants to apply for a loan.
Until that point, YouLend's design focus had been minimal and we therefore had to take a step back and work on a complete redesign.
The main success metric is the conversion rate from signups to loan offers, i.e. the percentage of signed-up users who complete all the steps needed for YouLend to be able to make an offer. We determined that giving progress indication to the merchant increased confidence and the chances of completion and therefore explored two layouts - A horizontal progress layout (which faced some limitations, and a vertical menu/progress layout which we chose moving forward).
A screenshot of YouLend's previous application journey
The application journey needed to be adaptable to different brands so we developed a system with 2 colours per brand, a primary and secondary colour. The primary colour is a highlight colour, applied to buttons, selection states and is used in different levels of opacity. The secondary colour is applied to background elements such as the top bar which, and the darkness/lightness of the colour determines whether top bar elements should be black or white.
This system allows YouLend to quickly launch new brands with only the partner brand's logo, and one or two brand colours. Here's how it applied to Shopify.
We developed a number of design components based on Material Design, which were then reused throughout the merchant dashboard and partner dashboard.
Redesigning the merchant and partner dashboards
Once the application flow redesigned, we went on to redesign both the merchant-facing dashboard (where merchants can follow the progress of their repayments) and the partner-facing dashboard where partners can keep track of merchant applications and loans.
Partner dashboard - Advances overview
Merchant dashboard - Repayment progress
Marketing material
I also helped the marketing team determine a graphic direction, designing a number of case studies, social media ads, eBooks as well as a logo proposition and the general website.
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