I was the last designer brought into the team, joining after early decisions had already been made. There was no time to start from scratch — the challenge was to prioritize, protect the critical path, and turn a fuzzy backlog into a real solution: one that tackled the problem of business loans being a bureaucratic nightmare.
I leveraged low-fidelity base designs to move faster. Together with QA and UX, we translated stakeholder epics into actionable user stories and relied on secondary research to map regional benchmarks. While UX was focused on screen design, I was already reworking flows, tightening accessibility criteria, and making decisions with direct impact on development.
I used AI tools like NotebookLM and custom GPTs to synthesize market information, stress-test user stories, and explore edge cases faster. The outputs were never pasted blindly; I cross-checked them against real sources and discarded suggestions that conflicted with our constraints or the SME mental model.
<aside> 💡 This is a case about how a small team delivered a solution that lets SMEs start their loan applications with full visibility fast.
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Requesting a loan as an SME usually means weeks of waiting, back-and-forth phone calls, unclear forms, and documents no one really explains. It’s just as painful for the evaluation teams: they receive incomplete information, scattered files, and tons of unnecessary questions — questions that wouldn’t exist if the process were transparent from the start.
We designed this MVP to eliminate that friction. The goal was to shorten the path from intent to outcome, reducing user uncertainty and operational chaos for the business. All with a mobile-first approach, auto-save logic, and constant progress visibility — so the user doesn’t have to depend on anyone to keep moving forward with their application.
<aside> ⚠️ I didn’t design screens — I orchestrated decisions. That’s what made the difference.
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