Unifying two lending experiences around how customers actually choose

The 60-second version

The problem

A small-business lender needed to bring a separately branded retail experience into one website without confusing small-business owners and financial partners with very different goals.

I owned

Stakeholder discovery, heuristic evaluation, competitive research, UX strategy, complete sitemap, homepage content strategy, navigation system, and wireframes for every templated page type.

The pivotal decision

Organize financing around how customers actually seek it: by industry, business need, or known product, while giving financial partners their own faster task-oriented route.

What changed

The proposed architecture and UX direction carried into the launched redesign, creating a more scalable foundation for products, industries, resources, conversion journeys, and future campaigns.

My scope

The redesign problem was really an architecture problem

The company funds small and midsize businesses through direct lending and through a network of brokers and other financial partners. Its retail lending business ran on a separate brand and website, and that experience was being folded into the primary brand.

Small-business owners usually start with a need: covering payroll, buying equipment, managing seasonality, funding a remodel. Partners arrive with far more domain knowledge and a different set of tasks, such as submitting a deal, reviewing program information, or reaching a portal.

The existing experience reflected the company's internal structure more clearly than its customers' mental models. Combining the content without a new organizing model would have produced two businesses stitched together.

Experience A  ·  direct retail lending

Product-first navigation. Financing options compete for attention on the homepage.

Experience B  ·  primary brand, partner ecosystem

Attribute-first navigation. A partner call to action sits in the hero, ahead of borrower tasks.

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The challenge wasn't making two sites look alike. It was finding one organizing model that could serve both.

The architecture changed when I stopped asking customers to speak lender

The company needed to expose the breadth of its offering without asking visitors to understand its internal lending taxonomy first. That produced the principle the whole structure follows.

Let people enter through the language they know, then help them understand the product that fits.

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Four entry points, one hierarchy. Nobody has to translate a business problem into a financial product name before the site can help.

01 / Decision

Support three customer mental models in one navigation system

Some visitors browse by industry. Others recognise a use case such as payroll, inventory, or expansion. Experienced borrowers already know they want a term loan or a line of credit. I brought those entry points together inside a single Small Business Solutions menu, with a guided comparison path for anyone unsure where to begin.

02 / Decision

Two audiences needed intentional routes, not two separate websites

Borrowers often need orientation, comparison, proof, and industry relevance before they are ready to apply. Partners arrive task-oriented. Treating them as one generic audience would create ambiguity; splitting them into disconnected sites would undo the consolidation.

↳ Both routes rejoin under one shared brand system, navigation, and page architecture.

Diagram recreated from my documented architecture. The launched partner menu is internal material and is not reproduced here.

03 / Decision

The homepage had to route, reassure, and then educate

The homepage could not be a catalog of everything the company offered. I gave each stretch of the page one job in the decision journey, so the highest-value actions stayed visible while borrowers who needed orientation first could still get it.

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I placed the loan calculator after the primary decision and orientation points rather than at the top of the page. Useful interactive tools should support a decision without pulling attention from visitors who are already ready to act.

The sitemap became a shared model the rest of the team could build from

Two experiences became four top-level territories, each with a clear owner in the business and a clear job for the visitor. The structure is deliberately shallow so products, industries, and resources can be added without renegotiating the navigation.

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The architecture had to scale beyond the homepage

I wireframed every templated page type in the redesigned site. Three of them carry the system: an industry page, a product page, and the discovery page where undecided visitors compare options.

One architecture → reusable page types → implementation the team could extend

The system also had to hold together at interaction level

The loan calculator is the one place on the site where a visitor manipulates the product directly. Amount, term, frequency, and estimated payment all have to stay understandable together, on a phone as much as on a desktop.

The architecture became the foundation of the launched redesign

• The architecture and UX direction were implemented in the launched redesign
• The direct and partner experiences were brought into one shared system
• The structure supported product, industry, resource, and conversion journeys
• Client response to the launch was strongly positive

I would measure whether the new structure helped people choose the right path

With post-launch access, these are the questions I would put to the data. None of this has happened yet.

• Correct-path selection between borrower and partner audiences
• Navigation engagement by industry, use case, and financing type
• Starts and completions for borrower conversion flows
• Starts and completions for partner flows
• Guided comparison usage among undecided visitors
• Qualified-lead rate by landing path and acquisition source
• Search behavior and failed-navigation patterns

I would pair the analytics with moderated usability testing to learn whether small-business owners understood the differences among financing options, and whether partners could reach high-frequency tasks without detours.

Information architecture is business strategy made visible

The hardest part was not arranging links or modules. It was deciding how a company with multiple business models should present itself to people who do not share its internal vocabulary.

By grounding the structure in customer intent, I created a system that supported immediate conversion needs and a broader organizational consolidation at the same time.