The opportunity
Zype is an Indian credit super-app, instant personal loans, BNPL, credit-on-call. The product had pulled in early users, but the core lending flow was modeled on the math a bank uses, not the questions a first-time borrower asks. "Can I afford this?" was being answered with "Your credit limit is ₹X.", two completely different conversations.
HumanX was brought in for a 4-week sprint to redesign the flow with an explicit brief: lending designed for life-fit, not credit limits. I owned the UX track.
The problem
The existing flow optimized for the wrong audience. It assumed the user already understood credit, EMIs, processing fees, and the trade-offs between loan tenures. The actual user, a 25-year-old in tier-2 India taking their first formal loan, was asking different questions:
- "How much can I actually borrow without it stressing my month?"
- "What will I pay every month, in numbers I can plan around?"
- "What happens if I miss a month?"
- "What's this fee, and is it baked into the EMI or added later?"
The flow had answers for all of these, buried under jargon. The design problem was making them load-bearing.
How I worked
1. Research, interviews + funnel-drop analysis
Week 1 went to research. HumanX paired me with the Zype product team for borrower interviews, plus a deep dive into the flow's funnel-drop analytics. Two patterns showed up immediately:
- Eligibility was the silent killer. Users who didn't qualify for their requested amount got a generic decline. Most never came back.
- Cost surprise was the loud killer. Users who completed eligibility were re-bouncing at the terms-and-fees screen because the all-in cost wasn't visible until the second-last step.
2. Jobs-to-be-done, what borrowers were actually hiring the flow for
I clustered the interview signal into JTBD statements. "When I apply for a loan, I want to know what I'll pay every month, so I can plan around it without surprises.", patterns like this became the brief for every screen.
3. Use cases, what each persona walked through end-to-end
Two use cases drove the flow design, a confident first-time borrower applying for a salary-backed loan, and a wary second-time borrower returning after a missed EMI. Both surfaces had to be the same flow with different supporting copy.
4. User journey + information architecture
The redesigned flow followed a different shape: eligibility-first, then a personalized terms screen, then a cost timeline, then a review. Decline states became actionable (here's what would qualify you instead), not dead ends.
5. Wireframes, locking the structure before pixels
Wireframes locked the most important pattern: a cost timeline component that visualized monthly outflow over the loan tenure, with the EMI, processing fee, and any prepayment penalties laid out month-by-month. No more cost-surprise.