Personal Loan Marketplace
Connecting people with financial solutions, faster
Role
Focus
Team
Platforms
Lead Product Designer
Product design, visual design, interaction design, journey auditing, and design-system adaptation
Product Management, Development, UX Research, Content, and Design
Web, iOS, and Android
Overview
I was brought into the Loans team to refresh the experience after completing similar work on credit cards. The project had two primary requests: Improve pre-funnel traffic and increase overall CTR. The problem was that only 10% of users were eligible for pre-funnel offers and, while post-funnel offers were often better, it required going through a 7-page wizard full of questions to get there.
The existing personal loan pages hadn't been updated in some time–the offer pages didn't include the ability to filter offers, there was no messaging or easy way to find offers that had compelling details like lowest APR or lowest monthly payment, and most importantly, it relied on that 7-page wizard for success. Working with the team, I helped reshape the experience by thoughtfully adding filters, highlights, the Loan Profile, and, what we called, the Top 3 modal.
Original flow
Approach
After reading through the PRD, my favorite way to start a project is to audit the existing experience. I find so much value in the take-aways I get from a "fresh eyes" perspective and you only get to experience it once and the learnings can be so so valuable. I began with an in-depth audit of the full user journey. I paid close attention to the seven-page wizard, which we call The Funnel–the experience relied heavily on this to get users to see better offers.
During my time at Experian Ive also learned it's particularly important to design any financial product with empathy. The customers who find themselves on the Personal Loan marketplace page may potentially be experiencing financial hardships. Money can carry a lot of emotion and stress along with it and keeping that in mind has helped me look beyond the request to increase CTR or revenue to what would make the experience as informative as possible, easy to understand, and reassuring.
Approach
Improve pre-funnel traffic: the Top 3 modal
The only way to improve pre-funnel traffic was to increase the number of user's with pre-funnel offers. The best way to do that was to provide our partners with as many of the user's funnel responses as possible, without making the user actually go through the funnel. I dove into the 6 questions we ask and found that not all partners required all questions to make an offer. Furthermore, there were only 3 questions that the majority of partners wanted to know that also had the greatest impact on the quality of offers.
My hypothesis was that if we prompted all first-time personal loan users with these 3 questions before taking them to the next screen (pre-funnel marketplace or to the funnel wizard to complete the remaining questions), we would see an increase in pre-funnel offers, better pre-funnel offer quality and higher CTR. We had enough for a test.
Approach
Increase overall CTR: card design
To support overall CTR, I needed to make it easier for users to find the offer that best fit their needs. I was going to start my focus on 2 areas, 1, make it easier for users to see at-a-glance why an offer was strong and how it compared to all their offers, and 2, provide users with the ability to filter their offers by whatever detail meant the most to them (think APR, monthly payment, loan amount).
I started with the offer cards, the heart of the offer page. I knew that I would be leveraging the new Marketplace offer card component I had created for credit cards. I had designed that component for reuse across Experian’s Marketplace as an effort to align the appearance of all our domains, with room for each one to customize it to their needs. These new offer cards featured a variety of elements that were designed to call-out specific types of details. For example, I had embedded Highlights, which were reserved for the most compelling details, like lowest APR or lowest monthly payment. I also included a banner to showcase special kinds of offers (like a holiday special for credit cards or a secured loan for personal loans) and a Headband that ran across the top of the offer that would be used sparingly, for the most important messaging, like pre-approved offers.
Approach
Increase overall CTR: filters
At the time, the team was really trying to drive 100% design system adoption, so I was required to use specific Atlas components for the filters. I would have preferred a different visual treatment for the filters, which felt disconnected from the page, but worked with the available components. We knew we would be tracking the engagement of this MVP version and I planned to make my case for my preference if the numbers weren't meeting our expectations. UXR and I had planned to test both and I made sure to share both versions and Product and Dev, who were all on board for this back-up plan, if we wanted to use it.
Approach
The new Loan Profile
At the time the funnel was a one-time flow that re-set every 30 days. We called it "Jail" and the user's offers remained the same that whole time. This was by design but it was also a hinderance. While these 30 days provided users access to these "better" offers for a whole month, I questioned if we couldn't increase offer quality in pre-funnel as possible by connecting it with the new Top 3 modal and making the funnel more of an on-going profile that was easy to maintain as their needs changed. I explored banner and form variations within Atlas instead, working with Content to keep the information concise and educational. I wanted to test how participants felt about the concept of a personal loan-specific profile, and ensure there wouldn't be confusion with the broader Experian profile that housed similar info. At the time we didn't have the ability to combine the two, but that was our preferred approach, a singular Experian profile that included all of the user's information and preferences (income, credit cards on file, personal loan search details, car insurance,...). We tested a variety of entry-points and graphics, as well as copy and placement.
Card design
Filters
The Funnel
UXR and I worked together to formulate the tests and questions, making sure each of our hypotheses would be addressed. We first tested which signals (Highlights, banners, Headband messaging) mattered to users. For our primary audience—users below Prime—No Ding Decline mattered more than high approval odds or lowest APR. Prime and Super-prime participants focused almost exclusively on lowest APR and showed little interest in the other signals. This gave us a more useful basis for prioritization than treating every feature as equally important. Another primary take-away was that the new offer cards and signals were effective in making offers easier to scan and understand. We also gathered feedback on the order of the offer details within the offer card. We expected loan amount to come first, but estimated APR was the clear preference, so I moved it into the first position.
Initial testing showed that many users overlooked the filters at the top of the page. We never received this specific feedback, but I suspect it was because the button titles were not supported by a background or a border, they were just floating words. One participant said “I was just looking at the loan offers here, but I didn't notice the filters up here”, and so we tested adding a callout after 20 offers that would serve as a useful reminder to use the filters if they were having trouble finding offers that fit their needs. That simple banner worked well enough that testing saw an increase in filter usage, with one participants saying "I do like that it has this little text box that says you can narrow down with the filters." We planned to track filter engagement in production but I particularly wanted to follow up on these 2 elements to make sure our new banner wasn't just a patch. Finding the root cause rather than creating a new solution is my preferred way of working.
Before the Top 3 modal and Loan Profile, the journey relied on the Funnel to get these 6 pieces of user info, as well as PII and agreement to the post-funnel terms and conditions. Since we had essentially updated the format of the funnel when we created the Loan Profile, we decided to show users who had no pre-funnel offers the one-page Funnel instead of the wizard. In total, 49 of 60 preferred this new one-page format, so we decided to add that update to a future release.
After discussing the approach with UXR, we decided to do a bare-bones test with minimal improvements from the funnel content. We knew the funnel needed certain refinements and additions, but we wanted to focus the data we would receive on the addition of the Top 3 modal to the flow, not on the other updates we planned to make.
Top 3 modal
We used research to check design directions and the new flow. We conducted several moderated and unmoderated tests.
Testing
"I like the layout. I like that it's big enough and that the important information is right up front. I don't have to go digging for it."
When asked about the offer cards and page
Add-ons
Supporting a closer look
The offer details drawer was out of scope for MVP, but we made a case for several updates in a follow-up release that supported the changes to the primary shopping page. With a more prominent "See details" button we suspected more traffic to be driven to the drawer. We added a concise “Top 3 Reasons” section explaining why the offer stood out, and a more refined “Details” section that replaced a 3-tabbed section with duplicative info on each tab. The new details drawer brought loan terms, the most compelling features, supporting information, and reviews into a continuous view. The reviews update also accompanied an engineering transition from an SDK to an API.
Original flow
Updated flow
Outcome
Outcome
Improve pre-funnel traffic: the Top 3 modal
The addition of the Top 3 modal resulted in $60K in additional monthly revenue, an 8.3% increase in revenue per visit, and a 6.9% increase in click-to-approval.
The modal reached 85% of personal loan visitors. These results confirmed that collecting user information earlier is associated with stronger downstream business performance and we were extremely happy with the results. Even more, we already had ideas for how to optimize this screen and suspected we could improve these numbers even further.
Update: See the case-study for the Top 3 Modal improvements to see how we designed a more personalized experience.
Outcome
Improve overall CTR: Filters
After releasing the filters in production we saw no statistically significant change. It wasn't until we added that new banner after 20 offers that engagement with the filters increased 18%. Interestingly, offer CTR wasn't affected by the increased usage of filters. This was a valuable take-away. Some testing participants had mentioned not knowing what filters to apply, meaning many of our users either didn't know what they wanted or didn't know the importance of certain offer details. These were extremely useful insights we planned to explore for the next iteration of the personal loans page.
Outcome
Improve overall CTR: Card design
Starting with a four-week evaluation at 50% exposure, the offer card refresh was rolled out to 100%. The evaluation summary reported lower offer click-through rates, but higher visit-to-fund, click-to-fund, and revenue per visit. This translates to a more focused shopping experience where clearer information helped users assess offers before clicking, so they were more selective and better prepared when they wanted to proceed with an offer. They were able to better assess which offer they wanted from the list view, and as the numbers show, when they did click on an offer, it more often resulted in a funded loan.
During FY26 (April 2025–March 2026), Experian’s Personal Loans business reported 42% year-over-year revenue growth, 39% more clicks, and 24% more approvals—with approximately 60,000 additional loans issued. These design updates contributed to the broader product improvements during this period; these results reflect the combined work of multiple teams and initiatives.