Over the past three years, I've been working on interesting user experience challenges at Prosper.com. Our team was assembled when Prosper was seven years old and was greatly in need of an overhaul. We've been steadily modernizing the services and design, transitioning into a mobile-friendly leader in our space based on innovation and a user-centric approach. The fin-tech industry can be confusing and the nature of the site requires thoughtful solutions for both borrowers and investors to help them manage the unique and complex financial accounts.
Our UX team is comprised of researchers and designer/user experience specialists. We identify challenges based on business needs, research, user interviews and see a project through from white-boarding, prototyping, internal reviews, user testing, development, beta releases, feedback gathering and public release.
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Easily transferring funds is an essential tool in helping our customers get money on and off the investor platform. We updated the interface from the previous design (circa 2007) in order to make the process much simpler and more flexible. I designed the flow in a modal overlay so that we could launch it from many areas on the site and allow the user to stay on the same page and in the context they were involved in, rather than taking them out of the experience and dropping them into a completely different page. Another goal was simplicity. I wanted the process to be a single click if using the default settings or a few clicks at most for setting up a custom schedule or a repeating transfer.
PROSPER 2015-2017
Prosper.com is the OG fintech matchmaker, cutting out traditional banks to let regular people lend directly to each other. The UX headache is hosting a party where the two guests have nothing in common: borrowers who want a "blink-and-you-miss-it" application, and investors who want to geek out over granular risk data like they’re in The Big Short. It’s a high-wire act of making the interface feel friendly enough for a $10k kitchen remodel loan while remaining serious enough that an investor won't fear a digital abyss. Essentially, we had to be a cozy neighborhood coffee shop and a high-security vault at the same time.
Scroll below to see some of the projects I got to work on...
INVESTOR DASHBOARD
Our team took the lead on overhauling the Prosper Investor experience because honestly, the old version felt a bit like an Al Gore era lockbox. Our goal was to pull back the curtain and make everything transparent and easy to digest so people would actually enjoy checking their accounts more than once a year. I built a dashboard that acts like a flexible container for dynamic info. It’s designed to grow with the user and has plenty of room for new data visualization tools to be plugged in later without breaking the layout. Getting this right meant a ton of quality time in research sessions with our marketing and Capital Markets teams to make sure we weren't just making it look pretty but also making it functional for the folks moving serious money.
TRANSFER FUNDS MODAL
Moving money in and out of the platform is the lifeblood of the investor experience, so it shouldn't feel like pulling teeth. When I started, the transfer interface was a total time capsule from 2007, so we gave it a massive overhaul to make it simpler and more flexible. I moved the entire flow into a sleek modal window so users could handle their business from anywhere on the site without getting kicked off their current page. My North Star was pure simplicity: I wanted the whole process to be a "one-click and done" situation for default transfers, while still keeping it incredibly easy to set up custom schedules or recurring deposits with just a couple more taps.
BROWSE LISTINGS
We completely revamped how people hunt for and buy "listings" (translation:"a slice of a loan"). First I massively improved on the manageability of the listings by cleaning up the presentation, adding color and filtering. Before this, the purchase process was a bit of a slog, so I introduced a proper "cart" feature. It sounds simple, but it was a total game changer because it finally let investors select a handful of different listings and check out in one clean transaction instead of doing it one by one like it was 2007. All of these tweaks came straight from listening to our users, and the payoff was huge. We saw a massive spike in total note sales because we finally made the buying process feel as natural as filling a shopping cart on Amazon.
AUTO INVEST
When I first jumped onto the Investor team, we were staring down some pretty big goals to bring in new users and get our internal tools to actually reflect the variety of loans sitting on our Marketplace. To hit those targets, we went all-in on making the platform more transparent and flexible so investors didn't feel like they were flying blind. I designed a system that let the power users tinker with their own custom formulas while still gently nudging everyone toward the Marketplace Mix, which is basically the "Goldilocks zone" of safe and effective investing. I wanted to make the setup feel like a breeze while giving people the sliders and knobs they needed to find that perfect sweet spot for their specific strategy and maximize their returns.