Asset Finance

From Fragmented Journeys to Seamless Finance: Designing a Unified Omnichannel Experience

Enterprise product design across partner portal, application flow, and future-state platform for a major asset finance provider serving customers, dealers, and internal teams across Australia and New Zealand.

Product Design

User Research

Duration

7 months

Team

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

Client

A Major Asset Finance Provider, Australia & New Zealand

Overview

The client embarked on a large-scale digital transformation program to modernise its asset finance experience across Australia and New Zealand. Customers, dealers, and internal teams relied on fragmented systems and manual processes, leading to duplicated effort, delayed responses, and inconsistent experiences across channels.

I was embedded within a cross-functional agile team, working across research, UX and UI design, prototyping, and testing to help define a future-state omnichannel experience. Through deep user research, service design, and iterative product design, I contributed to delivering a suite of future-state concepts and self-service platform prototypes that simplified complex financial journeys, improved transparency, and empowered all three core user groups. My focus was on designing intuitive, scalable solutions that balanced user needs, business priorities, and technical feasibility.

The Challenge

The client aimed to deliver a seamless, customer-centric omnichannel experience while navigating complex organisational structures, legacy systems, and multiple user groups.

Three key challenges shaped the work:

  • Designing for three distinct but interdependent user groups — end customers, dealers, and internal staff

  • Reducing process friction, data duplication, and manual handovers across sales and service journeys

  • Translating strategic transformation goals into practical, testable product solutions that internal teams could sustainably deliver

The challenge was to deeply understand each group's needs, workflows, and constraints, and transform a fragmented service ecosystem into a cohesive digital experience grounded in real user behaviour and operational reality.

The Approach

Working in Agile, Cross-Functional Delivery

I worked within a fast-paced agile environment across two-week sprints, collaborating closely with product managers, developers, business stakeholders, and offshore design and development teams. The work spanned research, experience strategy, interaction design, prototyping, testing, and delivery documentation — with regular design reviews, sprint showcases, and stakeholder presentations to align priorities, manage trade-offs, and maintain momentum.

Discovery & Testing

I co-led discovery interviews with customers, dealers, and internal service teams to understand real-world equipment finance journeys, support needs, and operational workflows. These sessions uncovered critical friction points across application, approval, contract management, and post-sale servicing.

I complemented interviews with usability testing of the future-state self-service platform concepts, validating assumptions and identifying improvement areas across mobile, tablet, and desktop experiences. I led synthesis and reporting, producing clear insights, opportunity areas, and design recommendations supported by direct user quotes.

I facilitated micro-sessions with subject matter experts to clarify data models, business rules, and service processes, ensuring designs reflected operational realities.

Designing for three key streams

Stream 1

Partner Portal UX/UI Redesign

I collaborated with offshore design and development teams to improve the usability and visual quality of the partner portal — used primarily by dealers, vendors, and partners to manage financing solutions, create quotes, and track applications. My focus was on contributing component patterns and interaction guidelines to the shared design system, clarifying interaction patterns, and producing detailed handover documentation to ensure design quality and implementation consistency across jurisdictions.

1

Partner portal before and after — improved navigation, data hierarchy, and application status visibility
Data grid pattern with filtering, sorting, and column management — contributed to the shared design system

Stream 2

Customer Application Flow Redesign

Led the future-state design of a high-impact, customer-facing finance application journey. By working closely with business and technical teams, I clarified data requirements and system logic, reducing repeated data entry and streamlining complex steps. The resulting flow clearly distinguished between known, verified, and new data — significantly improving efficiency and user confidence across the application process.

2

Complete future-state application flow — pre-approval through to settlement checklist
Screen callouts with data model annotations — distinguishing known, pulled, and new data to reduce re-entry

3

Stream 3

Future-State Self-Service Platform

I led the UX and UI design of the customer-facing self-service platform, enabling end customers to track applications, manage contracts, and resolve enquiries independently — reducing reliance on manual support and phone-based servicing. I designed the mobile prototype from discovery through to usability testing, built the information architecture, and created responsive experiences across mobile, tablet, and desktop. The responsive design work also incorporated dealer and AA Finance staff views, ensuring system-wide consistency across all user groups. I contributed component patterns to the shared design library, including designing the contact card component used across customer, dealer, and staff experiences.

Customer-facing MVP mobile prototype snapshot— designed and prototyped for usability testing
Contact card component — collapsed and expanded states, used across customer, dealer, and staff views
Contact card component — collapsed and expanded states, used across customer, dealer, and staff views
Information architecture
Information architecture
Complete prototype flow — wired for usability testing across multiple customer scenarios
Responsive design across mobile, tablet, and desktop — end customer, dealer, and staff views — prioritised by MoSCoW

Results

Results

Results

The future-state self-service platform concepts were validated through usability testing across all three user groups. Customers reported faster access to information and reduced reliance on manual support, while dealers and internal teams highlighted improved transparency, workload reduction, and clearer customer context.

Key outcomes included:

  • Validated self-service platform MVP concepts across customer, dealer, and staff journeys

  • Streamlined application flow reducing duplication and cognitive load

  • Interactive prototypes supporting agile testing, refinement, and stakeholder alignment

  • Comprehensive research report producing clear insights, opportunity areas, and design recommendations supported by direct user quotes

  • Detailed design documentation covering rationale, assumptions, and feedback decisions, enabling confident handover and long-term traceability for internal delivery teams

This work laid a robust foundation for the client's broader digital transformation program, aligning strategic ambition with real-world usability, operational feasibility, and measurable customer impact.

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