Stenn — Factoring & Invoice Financing

My roles: UX Analyst
Task
Build a new structure and competitive look for the factoring application.
About
Stenn is the largest and fastest-growing online platform for financing small and medium-sized businesses engaged in international trade.
Discovery & Audit
Goal: learn about business objectives and examine the product to define its strengths and weaknesses.
Before identifying red flags in the application, I gathered qualitative information through desktop research, discovery workshops, and interviews.

Understanding why certain solutions were integrated helped avoid flagging intentional elements, especially given the complex data security requirements of FinTech products.

Team interviews and discovery workshops also helped me understand the product team's challenges. Below is an extract from an interview:
Short and long-term business goals
  • Automate the deal pre-scan process for the operations team.
  • Improve the retention rate of new users.
  • Improve user experience to boost market competitiveness.
Product concerns & challenges
  • Complex onboarding procedure results in losing newly registered users.
  • Deal requests have to pass over 5 manual approval steps, causing significant delays.
  • Complicated UX and outdated UI might drive users away due to confusion, leading to lost trust.
Heuristic Evaluation
While heuristic evaluation can vary by product or audience, the method effectively initiates a search for usability flaws.

As a new user myself, I personally navigated the application, noting confusing areas. This approach allowed me to ask the team additional business-related questions and gather more data.

I apply Jacob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design.‍
Usability Testing & User Interviews
Qualitative research provides insight into the emotional aspects of product design.

I completed full usability sessions by combining usability testing with user interviews. The deliverables included session records and documentation with UX notes.
Apart from documenting my research, I ranked the usability flaws based on how often they were noted by the participants, which helped me prioritise tasks.

Below is an extract from the research analysis:
74% of the participants flagged the following:
  • Company indicators that allow a user to locate their company on the list are not evident (e.g., DUNS).
  • Illustrations explaining the financing opportunities are confusing.
  • The request form to add a supplier as a business party is difficult and takes a considerable amount of time to complete (over 4 minutes).
40% of the participants flagged the following:
  • The form fields don’t support keyboard navigation, like using arrow keys in drop-down menus.
  • The email address welcome@stenn.com doesn't encourage sending business enquiries.
  • If the user’s company cannot be found in the database, it’s unclear how to resolve it.
Less than 30% of the participants flagged the following:
  • It's frustrating that there's no option to review the provided data after moving to the next step of the deal submission.
  • Hard to locate the CTA to initiate the deal submission process.
Research
Goal: explore the market, understand target users and their pains, uncover design opportunities.
Persona Building
The product’s time in the market provided valuable insights — we identified our personas' needs and challenges by analysing data from our most successful clients.

However, when targeting SMEs, some questions arise:
Who is the decision maker in deal financing?
Who actually uses the application: a company’s CEO, secretary, or accountant?
Are those people tech-savvy? How far can we go with automation?
Competitive Analysis
In the Digital Age, where experience and interaction represent the brand alongside visual design, having information about competitors’ products or services is essential.

I studied the features of both direct and indirect competitors. Below is an extract of my research where I compared certain product areas that concerned Stenn the most.
Deal submission steps (Wizard)
Competitor A: 8 optional guided steps, users can submit their first request from their account.
Competitor B: 4 mandatory guided steps for the first deal submission.
Competitor C: 7 mandatory guided steps  for the first deal submission.
Financing opportunities
Competitor A: No assistance with identifying the user’s role, redirectiong to ‘see if I’m qualified’ page.
Competitor B: Not specified. Every company can apply for general financing with further notice.
Competitor C: Only suppliers of goods/services can apply for financing.
Validating Hypotheses
As part of the Discovery Team, my role was to generate hypotheses and conduct experiments aimed at identifying and removing obstacles in the customer journey.

We noticed: users with corporate email registrations were more motivated to complete the submission flow. However, it was unclear if our active users were authorised signatories who could sign documents on behalf of their company.

I designed the feature 'select who is authorised to sign documents' to identify our active users and evaluate the potential for collecting corporate emails.
User Experience Design
Goal: build a clear structure, design useful and delightful experience to interact with.
Information Architecture
Firstly, the business and system analysts established a business architecture to ensure that product initiatives aligned with the business flow.

Secondly, my task was to create an information architecture based on their framework. The key is to keep it simple and remember that it’s not yet a user flow.
User Flow & Wireframes
Unlike the design process for Iress — Wealth Management & Financial Advisory, where I created high-fidelity solutions and updated the design system simultaneously, here I added a wireframing step for usability testing and UX review while building a design system from scratch.
For complex or legacy products like Stenn, a user flow required cross-functional sessions to review and refine the design and functionality.
User Interface Design
Goal: create an aesthetic look to communicate brand values, reinforce users’ trust, and build a consistent design system.
Our team's task was to develop a token-based design system from scratch and integrate it gradually without disrupting the application's workflow.

More Stenn designs

See other prototypes developed for this project on my Dribbble.
View prototypes

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