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Work / Kasasa Mortgages & Loans

Utilized a human-centric, data-first approach to create an award-winning, intuitive, loan pay-off experience

Kasasa, a financial technology (fintech) company based out of Austin, TX put out a request for proposal which SeaLab was selected for in 2019, and again in 2021: to support Kasasa and their in-house UX team by providing expert guidance in not only helping produce work for Kasasa’s product suite, but also in user testing, user experience best practices, documentation, and design system creation and management.
  • User Testing
  • Information Architecture
  • User Experience Design
  • User Interface Design
  • Design System Creation
desktop preview of new redesigned Loan landing page discussing the loans and mortgages user experience by SeaLab

Problem #1

How can we utilize user testing and a data-driven approach to create and help Kasasa realize the value of a loan & mortgage payoff experience that is not just beautiful, but intuitive for their users?

Problem #2

How to help the Kasasa UX team operationalize design processes, systems, and documentation without losing momentum on the creation and management of daily product work requests?
three drawings of different characters defining the coach personality of watson for teacher advisor
early wireframes for Teacher Advisor with Watson depicting the lesson selection part of TA
early wireframe for IBM Teacher Advisor on the domain 3.oA domain for lesson planning
colorful depiction of Teacher Advisor's content model lesson planning including definitions of standard, cluster, domain and the types of activities and worksheets for each

Established an easy to find, user experience research & documentation process.

Kasasa’s platform of choice, Confluence, allowed us to build out a comprehensive, easily searchable, handbook for every project we worked on. From initial research gathering (usertesting.com interviews, screen capturing, meetings etc), to explorations and ideation (Miro, Figma, Confluence, Whiteboard photos), and on to initial and then final designs (Sketch, InVision, JIRA). The goal of each page was to both provide quick at-a-glance high level take-aways from each effort along with in depth access to all work files and iterations.
two overlapping screenshots of the first teacher advisor interface with lesson planning and lesson parts visible

Maintained a future-proof design by documenting styles and guidelines in parallel to testing and high-fidelity design creation.

Alongside user testing and iterating, SeaLab created a comprehensive style guide documenting the loans experience in detail. This was pushed from Sketch to InVision (and later ZeroHeight) and shared widely with development and leadership as the project moved to code. The styleguide allowed development to implement the solution quickly, reduced questions, got alignment across the teams, and allowed Kasasa to maintain the experience long into the future.
Three side by side screenshots of the iOFFICE style guide and component library created by SeaLab

Successfully created an award-winning, beautiful, and intuitive loan and mortgage user experience using a data-driven, human-centric approach.

SeaLab engaged with both existing Kasasa users as well as strangers to continuously test and iterate on design concepts and find the most intuitive concept for users throught the project. Kasasa Loan was named “Best Consumer Lending Platform” by FinTech in 2019 as a result of these efforts.
movie going through the quick reservation flow which was reduced by 66% thanks to sealab's user experience explorations

“The Kasasa Loan has helped me ao much... Being able to see my loan on the app has also helped me immensely, as I’ve been able to keep complete track of my finances.”

-Kasasa User Emilee L.

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