Rapid Loans

📌 Project overview

This project involved the complete redesign of Rapid Loans' online application form—an essential conversion point for personal and car loans. The previous form was outdated, performed poorly on mobile, and had a high abandonment rate. As the Senior UX Designer, I was responsible for redesigning this experience to be more intuitive, responsive, and operationally efficient, while supporting strict compliance and backend integration needs. The result was a clean, progressive application experience that successfully launched across Rapid Loans' digital ecosystem.

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👤 My role

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• Senior Product Designer leading UX design across research, flows, UI, and QA support

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I led the end-to-end UX design process, working as the sole designer alongside a product owner, a development team, and multiple stakeholders from compliance, sales, and credit assessment. I was responsible for aligning requirements, mapping user and backend workflows, designing wireframes and final UI, and ensuring implementation fidelity through dev handoff and QA. My role also included defining interaction patterns, microcopy, and validation behavior in collaboration with engineering and compliance partners. Although the team was made redundant shortly after launch, the form had already been deployed to production.

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🎯 The challenge

The original application form had a bounce rate of over 47% and frequently caused delays due to missing or incorrectly formatted information. Users were often confused by what was required at each step, and many abandoned the process entirely. Internally, this led to inefficiencies as the sales team had to manually follow up on incomplete applications. The business needed a solution that reduced friction for applicants, improved data accuracy, and integrated tightly with internal systems like our loan origination system, Equifax, and Illion—all while maintaining compliance with privacy regulations.

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🔍 Research & discovery

Rather than conducting user interviews, this project relied heavily on internal domain expertise from stakeholders across the sales, compliance, and credit teams. I began by mapping the end-to-end application journey as it currently existed and identified points of user friction and back-office pain. This was supported by existing web analytics, which highlighted key drop-off points—especially during the document upload and review steps. Collaboratively, we defined the necessary validations, field requirements, and API touchpoints. From these insights, I was able to propose a restructured flow that prioritised simplicity and guidance.

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🧭 Design goals

• Simplify the application flow
• Reducing cognitive load
• Support progressive saving
• Seamless integration with Taco & credit bureaus
• Ensure privacy, security, and consent

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🧠 Design process

My approach was centered on reducing cognitive load for the user while preserving all necessary business logic. The redesigned form was broken into clearly defined sections with progressive disclosure, so users were never overwhelmed. Each step was designed to include real-time feedback, contextual microcopy, and auto-saving, so users could resume their progress at any time. I paid special attention to error handling and edge cases, working with engineers to define fallback states and validation logic. The form was designed mobile-first to ensure accessibility across devices, and I created a scalable UI system in Figma to accelerate handoff and future iterations.

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🤝 Collaboration

Collaboration was key to the project’s success. I worked closely with our development lead to ensure that every field, validation rule, and transition state was feasible within our existing infrastructure. Regular reviews with compliance ensured we met legal standards for consent and data privacy. I also partnered with sales stakeholders to ensure the form captured everything they needed without burdening the user. Throughout the build, I remained involved in QA and UAT to ensure fidelity between the designs and the final implementation, helping troubleshoot UX bugs and making iterative refinements based on feedback.

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🧪 Testing & delivery

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• Conducted QA and stakeholder reviews
• Created fallback copy and error-handling states 🖼️ [Insert screenshot: Error handling examples or empty states]

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✅ Results

The form was successfully launched and made live across Rapid Loans’ main website, fully integrated with the company’s servicing systems. Due to team wind-down we were unable to measure post-launch impact. However, internal feedback from QA and stakeholder review sessions was extremely positive. The form was noted for being significantly more intuitive and visually clean, with stakeholders highlighting improvements in clarity, compliance handling, and backend data consistency. The project met all scoped technical and design requirements and was considered a successful delivery within the product timeline.

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💡 Reflection

This project was a reminder of how much thoughtful UX can impact not just the customer experience, but also operational efficiency behind the scenes. Although I didn’t get the chance to track its long-term success, I’m proud of how I balanced competing requirements—from legal compliance to technical feasibility—while delivering a clear, modern experience that simplified a complex process. The project demonstrated the value of lean design done well: focused collaboration, quick iteration, and user-centered decision-making, all within a tightly scoped product environment.

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