SOFI INC - Reimagining the SoFi Lending experience

Background

SoFi’s bread and butter businesses are student loan refinance and personal loans. Driven by high-volume organic and affiliate traffic, when I joined the team, we were mid-stream in sunsetting the first application experience - a long-form application that forced users to complete all of their application information in essentially one screen.

We launched the 2.0 experience, breaking down the key parts of the application into a progressive step=by-step application, which became the experience standard for most digital lending applications. This change resulted in nearly a 30% conversion lift across our different lending products and unlocked the ability for us to drive incremental conversion improvements through A/B testing.

Eventually, with buy-in from across the lending organization, we decided to invest in a full redesign, building on the affordances and learnings from the 2.0 experience to create a new application that would modernize our experience, give even more opportunities for experimentation, and drive further conversion while enhancing education and cross-sell moments.

Process

Working with our Product, Engineering, and Business partners, I helped guide the team to take on this 8-week initiative through the following:

Setting objectives - We defined success by setting out to:
1) Design a well-crafted, modern first touch SoFi experience that drives increased conversion and cross-sell
2) Create a flexible and scalable framework to support continuous experimentation across products and platforms
3) Increase efficiency across Design and Engineering

Project planning - Working within a tight window, we explicitly mapped a week-by-week timeline calling out activities and milestones, helping to drive alignment and visibly, helping to keep the team focused a minimize risk of churning.

Stakeholder alignment - SoFi has a sprawling organization with a complex intersection of functions and areas of ownership, so bringing visibly and alignment early to the project was critical. In addition, ensuring progress and regular opportunities for stakeholder feedback were essential to keeping momentum and on track.

Framework definition - We audited a variety of applications and funnels from competing lenders, e-commerce experiences, and adjacent product experiences to define an optimal experience framework to guide our approach. We identified the need for our experience to offer:

Sense of progress / orientation - Progress bar (current), transitions or confirmation upon task completion, verification status, post-submit expectation setting page

Guidance - Primary & secondary header, helper text, tips, accordions with contextual details, tertiary discount info on offers, calculator

Functionality - Text fields, dropdowns, type ahead lookup, selector buttons, radio buttons, tabs, results filter, loan amount slider, document upload, check boxes

Modularity - Support for marketing initiatives, cross-sell, referrals, feature promo, special messaging

Responsiveness - Error messages, input validation, error pages, document status, header

Delivery - Following rounds of concepting and iteration, we aligned on a final direction and moved towards user testing before building, refining interactions and progression animation.

Results

The opportunity to reimagine our experience with Lending 3.0 became a catalyst to improving our end-to-end application funnel, providing a modernized experience that flexed across mobile, web, and native. It further unlocked our ability to educate users, cross sell into other SoFi products, and helped to drive development efficiency, all while providing another conversion lift to the bottom line.