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UX Research  ·  UX UI Design

A unified finance experience, across every channel.

Client

A major asset finance provider, Australia and New Zealand

Timeline

7 months

Team

1 Principal, 1 Project Lead, 3 Product Designers (including me)

Redesigned partner portal and customer self-service app
The redesigned Partner Portal and the future-state customer self-service portal, a concept for an experience that does not yet exist.

The client was modernising its asset finance experience across Australia and New Zealand. Customers, dealers, and internal teams were working across fragmented systems and manual processes, which created duplicated effort, slow responses, and inconsistent experiences between channels.

Across three streams, I worked from research through UX design, prototyping, and testing to translate complex internal logic into clear, customer-first experiences, and to define the foundations for a future-state self-service platform.

The work

01

Partner Portal Redesign

A 15-day quick-win redesign of the dealer and partner portal used to create quotes, submit applications, and track customer financing. As sole designer, I reoriented the dashboard around the tasks partners actually perform and handed a fully documented build to the offshore team.

Partner portal dashboard, before and after the redesign
Before and after. The original dashboard led with a quote breakdown chart and a sales graph that Customer Services found little use for in practice. The redesign drops both and leads with an applications table, giving partners the status visibility they previously had to call or email to get, with quotes grouped by customer and clear, partner-facing status labels.
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With no budget to recruit partners, I treated the evidence already in the business as the research: partner interviews from a separate workstream, and the Customer Services lead, whose team fields the daily questions and knew which reference fields partners actually chase.

The subtler problem was language. The portal exposed statuses that described the lender's internal process, not what a partner should do next, so I sat with a system expert to learn what each state meant and remapped them to plain, action-oriented labels, handed over as an artefact the business could validate for feasibility. To keep the offshore handover fast, I tagged every component as existing, adjusted, or new, so the team could see at a glance what they had to build.

02

Customer Application Flow Redesign

An end-to-end design for a customer-facing self-service application, where none existed before. The core challenge was defining the minimum a customer needs to supply versus what the business requires to assess an application, then translating that logic into a clear, guided flow. I was sole designer, with stakeholder sessions co-facilitated alongside the CX strategy lead.

Full future-state application and settlement flow
The full future-state application and settlement flow, structured into pre-approval, application, contract, and settlement checklist stages, with separate paths for company applicants and sole traders. Designing the whole flow first made the structural logic, and the data needed at each step, visible before detailing individual screens.
Application screens with data requirement annotations
Selected screens with data annotations. Each field is tagged by how its data is handled: known, pulled from sources such as the ABR or Equifax, collected from the user, or to be verified. This kept the flow to the minimum a customer needs to enter, and gave the business a shared reference for where automation was possible. Design notes capture the rationale and service-design decisions behind each screen.
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To break the silos behind the broken process, the team ran a workshop with 26 stakeholders from 12 functions, Credit, Risk, AML, Legal, and more. I prepared the wireframes as the catalyst and synthesised the input afterward, where data reuse surfaced as the real unlock. One pattern that came from it: confirm a company's ABN, pull its director and shareholder details from Equifax, and the customer only has to check them, not type them.

Two decisions carried compliance weight. Consent followed the Consumer Data Right, granular and itemised rather than bundled into one box, and identity verification defaulted to Digital ID through a tab pattern that nudges the lower-friction path without removing the manual option, which also tightens KYC and AML.

03

Future-State Self-Service Platform

A future-state app letting customers access their contract information and handle key tasks (payout quotes, payment history, amortisation schedules, contract copies) without going through a dealer or the client. In a close-knit design team, I personally owned the contract page and payout flow, built the information architecture, designed the responsive system across customer, dealer, and staff views, and wired up the mobile prototype used for stakeholder buy-in and usability testing.

Future-state self-service prototype, contract page and payout flow
The future-state self-service prototype, showing the contract page and payout flow I owned. Customers can view contract details, payment schedule, and payment history, and request a partial or full payout quote, selecting a reason for compliance and receiving payout instructions. The flow works within the current system, where customers can see a payout amount but cannot action it themselves.
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Payout drove the work. It accounts for 80% of Customer Service calls, yet only 10% lead to an actual payout, so most of that volume is people who simply want to see a number. Moving it to self-service frees the call centre for the cases that need real care.

Getting it right meant designing service logic, not just screens. With the payments team I worked out when a quote can be trusted: it expires at 5pm the day before the next payment, allowing for bank deposit times and weekends so cleared funds land before the deadline. Legal and Compliance shaped the reason-for-quote step, and I ran the testing myself, six customers, six dealers, and three staff, then synthesised it and wrote the report.

The result

Across the three streams, the work translated complex internal systems into clear, customer-first experiences, defined the structural and data foundations for a future-state self-service platform, and aligned stakeholders across the business around a shared direction.

The mobile prototype was used to secure senior stakeholder buy-in and was validated through usability testing with customers, dealers, and internal teams.

Get in touch.

Based in Sydney. Open to in-house roles and contract work.