ONLINE FINTECH platform
LSQ
Offers businesses early payments on their invoices while extending terms to the corporate buyer.
When I first joined LSQ, the immediate focus was to create a new vertical within the company for a Supply Chain Finance (SCF) program - called FastTrack, which would need to be built from the ground up. The company already had a established presence in the fintech space - known as factoring - and was looking to branch out their services to where other funding companies had already obtained a strong presence.
As I was the first designer onboarded into the company, I worked quickly to evaluate their existing factoring platform and it was decided to base the first MVP for their SCF FastTrack program using existing design assets to help speed up production time. After months of researching the market, competitors, and investigating the user base, the product team determined that the best way to differentiate ourselves from existing competition was to create an extremely straightforward and simplified implementation to set us apart from the existing archetype of overloading the experience with too much unnecessary financial data.
Initial users described the experience as being "smart, simple and elegant".
The design for the existing factoring application was used as the basis for all future experiences to speed up development times.
We created many flowcharts and design materials to help communicate the new product ideas to internal teams.
Personas were formulated to help the team better understand the new platform customers and users.
In addition to standing up the companies second major online product in the SCF fintech space, leadership also tasked the design team with creating a comprehensive design system that we could utilize to speed up the design and production workflow and create a solid visual library for the front-end developers to code by. Special attention was also given to accessibility, as the company wanted to foster an enterprise-level product, so it was important the new system was WCAG compliant.
We created the LSQ Design System 2.0, in addition to an online Design Playbook that was built in Confluence to map out design specifications that would assist the company and developers with understanding our design principles and how to use the system throughout the product experience. Among the information in the Playbook were insights for our branding guidelines, logo usage and downloads, user experience best practices, copywriting, design workflows and methodologies, and a comprehensive breakdown of all of our design system components - including CSS specifications.
The FastTrack user interface grew with accessibility and usability at top of mind.
For the Design Playbook, a robust collection of design materials were created to better communicate the new design system to internal teams.
Great effort was given to making sure that the design team and the developers were on the same wavelength.
In addition to UX documentation, branding elements were also part of the Design Playbook, outlining the company Tone, Voice, Personality, Typography, Logo Usage and more.
The next crucial step after standing up the new fintech vertical of supply chain finance and implementing a brand new design system was to begin thinking about the other aspects of the platform that needed to be built if FastTrack was going to be a sure success:
LSQ Dashboard
The legacy factoring fintech product that the company was built around.
LSQ FastTrack
The primary experience for the SCF user, expected to eventually pay out millions of invoices per week.
The Buyer Experience
While FastTrack was the main product for the user, this application would service our customers, providing them with advanced data and analytics that reinforced their decision to choose LSQ.
The Admin Experience
An extremely robust backend application, allowing our internal teams to onboard new Buyers and Suppliers easily into the SCF products while providing important tools to help manage factoring clients.
Unique primary brand colors were designated to each fintech product to help differentiate them to our users.
The upgraded design system featured a new dashboard for FastTrack and also a newly revamped account-creation flow that drastically improved the onboarding process to a more frictionless experience.
One of my main tasks at LSQ was honing in on the Admin Experience to provide our in-house management teams a hearty and easy-to-use backend that could adequately contend with the influx of thousands of new customers and users that were expected for the supply chain finance product.