Funding
Funding is a FinTech startup that is reshaping the way everyday Australians can get a mortgage and invest in one location. Founded in 2015, Funding established itself as an awarded non-bank mortgage lender, trusted by both borrowers and investors in the short-term mortgage market. Funding has raised more than 4 million dollars of capital so far.
My role as solo Lead Product Designer involved designing the website & web app from the ground up. Ideation, wireframes, design system, visual language, illustrations & icons, interface design, user experience, and working with the development team to implement everything correctly.
Role: Lead Product Designer (Solo)
Project: Website & Web App Design
Year: 2020
Project Kick Off
To begin the design process of design for Funding I met online with Jack O’Reilly CEO. He explained to me what they wanted to achieve and what some of the challenges they wanted to overcome were. From this initial conversation, I was able to start to create a brainstorm board where we could hone into specific feature ideas that could solve for the defined user base. From there I started to look at direct and indirect competitors to paint a picture of what we would be up against and how we could differentiate.
Wireframes
Once we had defined the users and their main goals we started to look at how our designs could work. For the initial layouts, I created low-fidelity wireframes and shared them back with the team to start the process. We showed these wireframes to users in Sydney and Brisbane and took note of what was working and what needed to be changed. We did a few variations of these before moving into high fidelity.
Design System & Illustrations
While the wireframes and content were being confirmed by the team I started the design system, illustrations and icon sets. For the system I defined the typography, grids, colours, components and visuals to be used throughout the website and web app. Once completed I gave this to our dev team to start coding up. While I was creating the custom illustrations I kept the main users for each section in mind and worked with the team to represent them matching the brand.
Final Website Designs
After many rounds of iterations and testing with the Funding team, we landed on the final designs. I created these in Figma and made sure they were all pixel perfect and ready for development. Working with the dev team in the UK I made sure that all the designs matched the designs and helped define animations and interactions.
Investor Portal
To go with the Funding website we also created an investor web portal where users can choose investments, send and retrieve funds, read the latest investment news and refer friends. This portal design has followed a similar process to the above and has been growing in users base and engagement.
Release Feedback
When we released the new Funding website & web app, it was well-received by the customers and business team. They were ecstatic about the new functionality, extra information, and simple usability. When speaking to Jack the CEO later he informed me that conversions from the site are doing well and customers are really loving the designs. The business is now growing steadily and the team continues to use this tech platform for everything they need.
See the website here: | Funding.com.au 🌝
© Julio Castellano 2020