Improving the lead generation forms and implementing a healthy design process

I’ve designed a lead generation form that enabled customers to apply for equipment finance and working capital loans. The client, a leading provider of finance solutions for small and medium businesses in the United States, aimed to transform their lead generation form into a product for themselves and their partners. The form had to support various levels of customisation.

Company

NDA

Space

Fintech

Period

2021

The initial screen of the customer form.

Objectives & Challenges

The goals here were to improve the customer experience, generate higher quality leads and increase the conversion rate. The form had to support theming and various levels of customisation in terms of completion patterns and amount of information gathered.

Some of the challenges were:

  • steering conversations from the visual aspect to the business goals and improvement of the overall customer experience
  • ensuring that we eliminate the use of dark patterns
  • implementing a healthy design process.

A finance quote calculator, that precedes the customer form.

Mobile versions of the customer form.

Approach

I’ve started with understanding the business, talking to key stakeholders to familiarise myself with their ways of working, the challenges they were facing and their goals, constantly bringing the customers into the conversations.

I’ve mapped out all the journeys and ensured that we’re collecting information that is relevant to the customer in this key point of their financing journey. We’ve looked holistically at the customer financing journey, and we’ve uncovered opportunities to improve the experience even before the actual forms, like the quote calculators and marketing messaging on partner websites.

After we’ve got to a solid point in terms of visual direction and the overall journey I’ve started documenting and working with development to create a design system that formed the basis of the majority of the customer experiences when interacting with the company.

Experience patterns documentation preview from the design system.

Outcomes

We’ve successfully launched around 150 customer forms that saw a ~6.5% completion rate on the generic journey, ~30% on specific journeys.

Based on that initial work and consistent work throughout our collaboration I’ve also redesigned their website – that showed a ~29.7% average session duration increase and a ~13.4% bounce rate drop.

We’ve also started working on a suite of products for their internal workflows for the teams involved in the financing process.