Designing for credit under constraints
How to stay true to your designs while managing stakeholders
The premise was simple: design and launch a superior credit card alternative for young Indians — in short, build LazyCard.
And that’s where Kuldeep came in — the designer in charge of LazyCard.
Very quickly, Kuldeep realised this project was not going to be an easy one. His mission was to skilfully juggle requirements and feedback from multiple directions.
Internally, he had to balance PMs, marketing, tech, leadership, design, business, risk and legal teams. And on the outside, there’s our partner bank, the VISA team, the payment platform, and card printing team.
Yeah, fintech is complicated to say the least.
You win some, you lose some
In the next few months, the LazyCard design went through several iterations and countless stakeholder meetings. Sometimes we got our way, sometimes we didn’t.
Below are a few key decisions we made, so we could be ready with the first version of LazyCard for our internal launch:
Fighting for the flow🔗
Right off the bat, our partner bank and a few other stakeholders laid down some guidelines for the user flow. We were given recommendations to display more information and add more layers.
All this made the proposed flow feel longer and more tedious than before.
🤝 After comparing both flows, we decided we could work within the given constraints, and try to solve them with intelligent and efficient design.
And, since we couldn’t reduce the number of steps, we’d have to make the entire experience as smooth as butter.
Collecting consent ✅
For some parts of the flow, however, we couldn’t compromise and had to push back for the sake of good experience.
For example — one recommendation was to explicitly ask for the users’ consent at several points in the journey. This might end up becoming detrimental to the user experience.
🤝 After several discussions, we came to an agreement on having a single screen for all terms & conditions, policies, and user consent. A small win for us!
Adding spark and flair🔥
The business and product teams were looking forward to launching a card that was brag-worthy. Out of the ordinary visuals. Unconventional aesthetics.. think cool, stylish neon.
And we did just that.
We went all out on making a phenomenal card experience for our users. But we also hit a snag here — it would take some time to get the necessary approvals to implement these visuals. In the end, we wanted to launch fast and learn fast.
🤝 We decided to prioritise learnings over perfection. Rather than spending months on perfect visuals, we trimmed down some non-necessary aspects of the card design for our internal launch.
Braving real world materials 🖨
Similar constraints arose later while printing the physical card — the glow effect we added to our card design was disintegrating; the colour was bleeding, and the spotlight effect wasn’t crisp enough.
We needed to strike a balance between choosing the right card material, and keep printing costs low.
🤝 For a cleaner and crisper physical card, we removed some extra embellishments. However, we made sure the new look stayed true to our initial design aesthetic.
When it comes to design, pick your battles
Ask yourself, how much would this decision affect the user, and can we overcome it through design? If not — what’s the alternative?
Yes, it’s important to find a middle ground — but sometimes its important to also stand your ground.
Everyone involved in launching a product has their own set of goals to worry about. It’s up to us to figure out how to strike the right balance and juggle everyone’s opinions like a pro, while keeping in mind the best experience for the user.
Take it from Kuldeep, it’s no easy task.
✏️ Edited by Kanupriya Jain & Kuldeep Singh, 📷 Images by Kuldeep Singh.
