Designing for FinTech startup.

Internship experience at ZestMoney. I was a part of the design team in Bangalore for a period of one month as an intern in December 2016.

ZestMoney provides a way to pay using digital EMI, without the need for a credit card or a credit score on various sites and stores. Internship included working on various projects of different domains like branding, user experience, and promotional graphics.

Tasks over the month -

ZestMoney provides the service of buying things online using EMI options without any hassle and is one of the leading startups in the FinTech industry. The task overall was to enhance the user experience by making his/her interaction with the service flow comfortable, minimal and easy. Thus in a way, the whole process and documentation don’t look like a lot of effort.

Once the user decides to get EMI for a product, the complete interaction of the user with the company takes place generally through the mails. Thus emails are the point of contact and all the important information travel through them. These tasks were further subdivided into various cases as to how a user comes into contact with the company.

Task-1: When a user tries to access the EMI option through Zest on an online store payment portal i.e. post-enrollment, he/she has to go through some steps to secure the loan and receive confirmation and important information via email.

1. Create an account
2. Make down-payment
3. Rejected application
4. Upload documents
5. NACH upload
6. Loan approval

Task-1 User Flow

Task-2: If a user pre-enroll to the ZestMoney on the official website, then all the details can be filled in on the website and there will be a success mail sent at the end with the credit limit.

Task-2 User Flow

Task-3: After securing the loan and EMI option, the scenarios which are applicable to the user are to sent via the mail.

1. Disbursal mail — showing all the dates and amount to be paid.
2. Repayment Due
3. Repayment Success

Task-3 User Flow

Task-4: Branding and marketing. Promotion design for various social networking platforms.

Process -

To enable good interaction with the user and help him understand every step, the emails were designed with a proper theme for the post-enrollment, in a leading format with CTAs to help the user go through the right direction. The after credit approval emails were also designed in the different theme style to create a difference.

The complete workflow can be divided into these sections:

1. User Understanding
2. Information Hierarchy
3. Wireframes

User Understanding

The users were mentioned by my mentor, as the general middle class with an age gap of 22–40 being the primary customers as they are familiar with buying products online on various platforms, thus they understand the process and have a trust on the process. Most of them belong to the working class and understand the concept of EMI so they find familiarity with an online process.

The designs were made keeping them as the primary users. That’s why clean and direct mail themes were created, keeping it minimal.

Information Hierarchy

As the post-enrollment was the most used method by the customers applying for EMI through ZestMoney, the structure of the post-enrollment mails was fixed to generate a sense of continuity. The steps were -

For the pre-enrollment mail, there is only 1 template which was different as the rest of the procedure will be the same as the post-enrollment mails. After securing the loan, the mails for the disbursement, EMI payment reminder and payment received are designed in one single theme keeping the structure same.

Designed Mails

1. Applying for loan mail series

2. Pre-enrollment Success Mail

3. After credit approval

Promotional Design

Different designs made for social marketing campaigns

Learnings over the whole period -

1. Importance of user trust in a FinTech startup.
2. Desktop and Mobile versions of email template.
3. Worked on a fixed UI style guide for all the products.
4. Color theory.

Overall experience working as a designer in ZestMoney was amazing. They have an amazing team dedicated to their product. The working culture supported a lot to understand how to manage a product as a service to users and constantly evolve it with new opportunities.

PS: These designs were in December 2016 and they might not be currently used by the company. I wanted to share my side of work telling about how I designed these mails and what thought process led the way.

Feel free to contact me for any opportunities at singhi.pramit@gmail.com.
LinkedIn. You can check my portfolio here.