Case study — 2024-2026
Designing for borrowers who deserve better.
How our team redesigned Reevo’s loan management experience for near prime UK borrowers — and shipped it in 14 days after a critical technical pivot.
CLIENT
Reevo, UK
DOMAIN
Near prime Lending
PLATFORM
Mobile app
ROLE
Product Designer
Loan dashboard
The principle behind this project
“Beautiful mockups in Figma don’t matter if they never reach users. Design thinking, research, and creativity are necessary but they’re not sufficient.”
Near-prime borrowers were failing — not because of finances, but because of poor UX.
UK near prime borrowers, people in financial difficulty who don’t qualify for mainstream credit were managing their loans through desktop only portals with zero mobile access, no proactive alerts, and no visibility into their repayment options. The result was a system that made an already stressful situation worse.
Fragmented
Desktop only portals locked out mobile users entirely. No central data hub meant borrowers received inconsistent information across touch points, leading to confusion and higher error rates at critical moments.
Invisible
Zero proactive notifications meant arrears situations stayed hidden until they reached severe stages. Borrowers had no visibility into repayment options when facing temporary difficulty when it mattered most.
Anxious
Payment deadline anxiety was high and spreading. The support team was under significant strain from reactive calls. Collections struggled to implement early intervention because there was no touchpoint before problems escalated.
before
Desktop only portal, the borrower experience we set out to replace
25 interviews.
One signal: dignity was missing.
“Most borrowers had never accessed their loan portal, not because they didn’t want to, but because it wasn’t mobile accessible. Anxiety around payment deadlines was near universal.”
Five features. One consistent principle:
reduce anxiety at every state.
Every feature was designed around a single question: does this reduce the stress a borrower feels when they open the app? The design system was built to WCAG 2.1 AA standards — not as a compliance tick, but because accessibility in financial products is a trust signal.
Loan dashboard
Arrears support
Loan Dashboard
At a glance loan status. Designed to answer “am I okay?” in under 3 seconds without needing to navigate anywhere.
Payment Schedule
Visual timeline of upcoming payments with contextual information on each date, replacing a static table with an interactive, legible flow.
Arrears Banners
Compassionate, action-oriented alerts for arrears situations. Designed to surface options, not escalate panic. Tone tested in research.
Flexible Payments
Clear, in-app access to repayment options visible before crisis, not just after. Designed to reduce support call volume from early stage arrears.
Smart Notifications
Proactive, personalised payment reminders and account updates. Replacing silence with timely, relevant communication.
Design System · WCAG 2.1 AA Compliant
components
Buttons, alerts, forms, cards. Full component library
Accessibility
WCAG 2.1 AA across all interactive states
components
Colour, spacing, and typography tokens for eng handoff
components
All 5 core features + edge states + empty states
THe PIVOt
The authentication vendor failed.
We had 14 days.
After a 10 week project delay, we hit a second critical blocker: Kobil, our third party authentication vendor, failed to deliver a functional SDK. Authentication is the gateway to all user data, without it, nothing ships. The project was completely blocked.
My role shifted from Designer to unlocker. We made the call to pivot to AWS Cognito. Cognito’s UI customisation is severely limited, and we had 14 days to adapt the designs, integrate the new system, and submit to the App Store.
DECISION MADE
Pivot to AWS Cognito. Stop protecting the pixel-perfect vision. Start unblocking engineering. Ship the product where customers can benefit from it.
How 14 days actually looked
EVERY MORNING
Build Review on Real Devices
Engineers presented working prototypes for hands-on review. No simulations. Issues triaged immediately against a clearly defined critical vs. deferrable list.
All day, every day
Open Room
Design and engineering in a continuous sync. No ticket queues. No handoff delays. Decisions made in minutes, not days. The absence of process was the process.
Twice daily
Build QA Reviews
Design QA integrated directly into each sprint rather than as a post development task. Cross device testing at every review. Issues caught before they compounded.
The hard constraint
Designing Around Cognito
No pixel perfect auth screens. We used system components with Reevo branding layered in. Generic error messages replaced with contextual help. SMS fallback added for accessibility.
Post-launch, users noticed.
↑
Customer NPS
Significant improvement among active app users compared to non app borrowers in the same cohort.
Tracked post-launch via in-app survey
↑
Retention
Higher renewal rates among app users vs. non app users. Suggesting the experience improved perceived value of the loan relationship.
Compared against pre-app baseline
↑
Missed Payments
Reduction in missed payments attributed to smart notifications and improved payment visibility in the dashboard.
Driven by notification design + payment schedule
↓
Collections Efficiency
Lower collections costs and faster arrears resolution — a direct result of early intervention through in-app arrears banners.
Measured against collections team data