Achieve Personal Loans
Redesigning a high-impact financial journey for clarity, trust, and scale
Achieve Personal Loans is a core web product experience at Achieve, created to help users explore and apply for personal loans with clarity and confidence. As the product and business evolved, we needed an experience that was not just visually polished, but strategically aligned with user intent, regulatory constraints, and internal operational needs.
This project involved deep cross-functional collaboration with Product, Engineering, Risk, Compliance, Research, and Data Analytics. I led the experience design, from strategy and research synthesis through prototyping, design systems integration, and launch, with an emphasis on making the experience understandable, scalable, and consistent with Achieve’s broader platform.
Timeline: 3 months
Role: Staff Product Designer
Team: 1 PMs, 1 UX Writer, 3 Engineers
Tools: Figma, Figma Dev Mode, Figma Make
🧪 Improved usability clarity in testing
👍 Stronger stakeholder confidence in direction
📉 Reduced support questions about eligibility/process
💬 Higher reported user confidence
⚡ Faster internal iteration cycles
Impact:
01
Project Snapshot
When we started, Achieve’s Personal Loans experience had several challenges:
Users struggled to understand eligibility and next steps.
Drop-off was high at key moments of financial commitment.
Messaging and design patterns varied across product lines.
Regulatory and risk requirements introduced friction.
There was no unified strategy for how trust was communicated.
The task was not just to redesign pages, but to reframe the experience so users could progress with confidence, and internal teams could iterate and scale without re-inventing patterns for each new surface.
02
Goal and Success Metrics
Design Goals
Clarify the user journey from discovery to decision.
Reduce friction at key stages without sacrificing compliance requirements
Build patterns that could be reused across financial product journeys
Support exploration and discovery while making intent explicit early
Enable faster iteration through shared components and design system upgrades
Business Goals
The core measurable goal of the project was to improve how many high-intent users entered the multi-product acquisition flow from the personal loans landing page.
Success Metrics
Increase Hero CTA interaction (more users checking their rate)
Increase scroll depth (engagement with “How it Works” and value props)
Increase trust element interaction (Trustpilot + social proof)
Improve clarity + comprehension (measured in usability testing)
03
Research & Insights
Clarify the user journey from discovery to decision.
Reduce friction at key stages without sacrificing compliance requirements.
Build patterns that could be reused across financial product journeys.
Support exploration and discovery while making intent explicit early.
Enable faster iteration through shared components and design system upgrades.
Strategy & Principles
From research, we established guiding design principles that informed every decision:
Clarity before commitment
Progressive disclosure
Trust at every turn
System-first design
Key Design Decisions
Several decisions fundamentally shaped the direction of the experience:
Shifted eligibility signaling earlier in the journey to reduce anxiety before form entry
Reframed the application flow around progressive disclosure to lower abandonment
Consolidated fragmented trust messaging into consistent system-level patterns
Prioritized modular components over page-specific designs to enable reuse across products
These choices helped balance user confidence with business and operational needs.
Ideation & Prototyping
I led ideation sessions with PMs, Engineers, and Researchers to explore alternative structures for the Personal Loans flow. We mapped user journeys, created low-fidelity wireframes, and rapidly prototyped variations to test assumptions.
Prototypes evolved in fidelity using Figma, which allowed us to explore content hierarchy, uncover edge cases, validate navigation logic, and align early with engineering on feasibility. This iterative phase helped reduce ambiguity and bring teams together around shared solutions before development began.
Navigating Constraints
Personal Loans required balancing user needs with risk considerations and evolving stakeholder direction. As priorities shifted and new ideas surfaced, I focused on creating alignment through clear documentation, thoughtful synthesis, and user-centered recommendations.
I captured feedback across Product, Risk, and Engineering, identified underlying intent behind requests, and grounded decisions in user behavior, best practices, and business goals. When tradeoffs emerged, I brought data and design rationale back to stakeholders to move conversations forward.
By pairing stakeholder input with user insights, I helped shape solutions that balanced business requirements with meaningful user experience, turning competing perspectives into clear, actionable direction.
04
Solution Highlights
Users could self-identify their needs before entering lengthy form.
Intent-First Entry Points
Complex information was broken into digestible steps to reduce cognitive load.
Progressive Application Flow
Eligibility indicators, contextual help, and educational cues appeared earlier to reassure users.
Trust & Transparency
Modular Pattern Library
Form modules, progress indicators, and trust banners were designed for reuse across product journeys.
Design System Integration
Patterns created here seeded improvements in the broader design system, accelerating future work.
05
Collaboration & Learnings
Beyond driving design execution, I facilitated alignment across Product, Engineering, and Risk through weekly design reviews, shared prototypes, and structured feedback loops. This surfaced tradeoffs early, helped unblock teams faster, and created a shared understanding of success metrics across parallel workstreams.
This approach allowed teams to move forward with clarity while maintaining momentum.
Leadership in Practice
This project depended on close partnership across teams:
Product Management for roadmap and success metrics
Engineering for feasibility, performance, and implementation constraints
Risk and Compliance to ensure regulatory alignment
Research and Analytics for direction and validation
Data teams for tracking outcomes and iteration signals
Regular pairing sessions, alignment workshops, and collaborative reviews ensured decisions were grounded in both user needs and operational realities.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
While some metrics are internal, the work delivered meaningful shifts in experience and team practice:
Higher clarity and confidence reported in user feedback
Reduced abandonment at key flow transitions
Faster component reuse across adjacent financial products
A shared pattern language that improved cross-team efficiency
Beyond surface results, this redesign helped evolve how Achieve approaches intent-driven flows and modular system components as core to web product design.
Outcomes & Learnings
06
Reflection
This project shifted how I approach early discovery. Using Figma Make and AI-assisted ideation let me rapidly test layouts, information hierarchies, and trust placements, which moved the work from visual iteration to product learning. By pairing these experiments with funnel analytics and competitive audits, clear patterns emerged: users converted when rates, eligibility, and timelines appeared upfront; scannable benefits and human visuals improved comprehension; and clean layouts with consistent CTAs supported faster decisions.
Our original page buried trust signals, overemphasized the calculator, and lacked clear hierarchy, especially on mobile. AI enabled parallel exploration of multiple hero structures and information architectures, creating space for deeper synthesis. What shipped reflected those learnings, with trust markers moved into the hero, simplified high-intent messaging, a three-step guide beneath the hero, and tighter value propositions. The result was a clearer, more scalable experience grounded in rapid experimentation, real user data, and cross-functional alignment.
What I’d Explore Next
With additional time, I would focus on:
Deeper personalization based on user intent signals
Smarter eligibility previews powered by dynamic data
Post-launch experimentation to optimize key drop-off points