hypcloud is a digital real-estate financing platform connecting real-estate developers with banks and lenders to finance their projects. I joined the company as the first UI/UX designer in the tech team. Therefore, I had the opportunity and the space to set the art direction for the company.
UX/UI design | Art direction
Fintech & Proptech
5 years employment
Project scope
✅ Build a smooth user experience (UX) for a real-estate financing platform. This industry is heavily bureaucratic, so our target audience are everything but tech-savvy. Making a simple UX was crucial for user retention.
✅ Create feature prototypes to help business, backend, and frontend teams to align clearly on feature requirements.
✅ Design the user interface (UI) for the app and hand it over to front-end developers (including animations, prototypes, and full user flows).
✅ Design the UX/UI for the internal management platform for the sales team (Backstage) - Later monetized as a SaaS product!
✅ Build a design system/component library following atomic design system to ensure consistency and save design & development time.
Design process
In this -more detailed- case study, I explore the status quo of the design back then, the principles underlying it, and why it doesn’t work anymore. Abstracting principles on that level allowed me to not only design and improved iteration for that one time but inspired all the many current improvements to the user experience and user interface.
The golden rule for UX is to KISS - keep it stupid simple.
After conducting rounds of research, I did a card-sorting activity within the team (as I didn’t have access to other users of the platform due to company setup). Based on this activity and mapping the results to common UX practices, I was able to then build a sitemap and start creating low & high-fidelity wireframes.
Impact
SaaS requests: The platform felt intuitive and user-friendly that some of our bank users requested a white-label version of the platform to use as their own client management platform.
Work hours saved: Beside the main app, the backstage platform that I designed for the internal sales team helped the team save hours of work by automating many tasks like contact reminders, assigning tasks, sending automatic email, and so on…
Takeaways
The limited access to users taught me to find work arounds for traditional user-testing method. For example, I’d reach to sales people from the team and ask them to ask users for verbal feedback about certain features. I’d take the chance of a new colleague joining the team to conducting user testing with them before they’re familiar with the app and so on.
Being the only in-house designer in the team means I still have to do some effort to keep my seat at the table of decision-making. It also means I have to compromise on some design requirements since development resources are allocated for different things at times.