Objective

Design an end-to-end digital self-service journey for SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) to apply for credit cards, unsecured loans, and overdrafts — with minimal colleague intervention to reduce operational costs associated with call centres.

Key Goals

• Enable businesses to apply for single or multiple products via a digital-only experience.
• Support complex company structures, including multiple directors and legal signatories.
• Provide functionality for document signing and tracking, reducing dependency on traditional mail workflows.

Business Requirements

• Businesses must be able to apply for unsecured loans, secured loans, and credit cards.
• Applications for a single product (e.g. a business loan) can be completed entirely online via the Product Selection Tool, providing a streamlined, digital experience.

• Multi-product applications (e.g. loan + credit card + overdraft) currently follow a traditional telephony process, but applicants can still:

  • Track progress
  • Complete document signing
  • Access updates

  via the new digital interface.

• Applications typically require multiple documents to be signed.
• Companies may have multiple authorised signatories (e.g. two directors and a secretary), all of whom must sign the same set of documents.
• Historically, this caused delays — particularly when signatories had different addresses — as documents had to be physically mailed and signed sequentially, often resulting in long wait times.

Design Considerations

• Although the original brief focused on a desktop web experience, the project scope later expanded to include mobile web.

  • I had originally designed the solution with responsive behaviours and content stacking in mind, so content structure remained unchanged for the mobile web requirement.
  • I did have to retrospectively update the mockups to visually demonstrate how the responsive design would function across viewports.

• Given the complexity of multi-product applications and multi-signatory workflows, a key challenge was designing modular, reusable UI components.

  • These needed to adapt to various scenarios while maintaining a clear information hierarchy and visual clarity.
  • The interface had to support permutations such as different combinations of products, varying user roles, and asynchronous document signing — all in a consistent and user-friendly way.

Lo-fi wire-flows

Pen and paper low-fidelity wire-flows were drawn up and reiterated on before being shared with stakeholders for validation from a business perspective. Once these were approved, it was time to turn these lo-fi design artefacts into hi-fidelity versions.

Hi-fidelity mockups

Static hi-fi mockups were built in Axure, to illustrate screen layout, information hierarchy, and content.

Whilst the project brief was initially to build a desktop browser experience, half-way through the project, there was a revised requirement to also design and build for a mobile experience. These mockups had to be adjusted to illustrate mobile screen sizes.

Interactive prototype

The hi-fidelity mockups of each screen were linked-up within Axure and added interactive behaviours to create a fully interactive clickable prototype to be used for user-testing.

Animation is integral to the user experience and I wanted users to see the gradual loading of content through the fade-in animations and transitions between page or content states. This was 'baked' into the Axure prototype for user testing and as a reference for developers to implement.

User testing

Preparation

I prepared an interview script based on the types of questions I wanted answered.

The Senior User Researcher refined it further and added their own questions.

Recruitment

Recruited numerous business owners (an even mix of existing Lloyds and non-Lloyds customers) for multiple user-testing sessions to be held within the Lloyds Banking Group dedicated on-site usability lab, over the span of a few months during the design process.

Participant size limited to six people per session, mainly due to difficulty in recruiting willing participants (to come to the Lloyds usability lab in London).

Participants were also selected to represent a wide demographic (age group, time in business, tech-savvy or tech-illiterate, business turnover, industry type).

For example:

• a university graduate, early 20s, recently started their own e-commerce business, IT-literate, annual-turnover: £ tens of thousands
• a millionaire businessman, in their late 40s-early 50s, in property and building trade
• a self-employed housewife, mid 30s, non tech-savvy, running a small mail-order business from home
• a tradesman, self-employed, early 40s, not that tech-savvy, turnover £100k
• A company director. in their 50s, in a company with three other signatories, had bad experience applying for a business loan with another bank

Format

Each participant was asked to step-through each stage within the interactive (clickable) Axure prototype, providing commentary on their thoughts and planned actions.

The Usability Lab was equipped with eye-tracking hardware and software but it was not used for these occasions.