What is DailyPe?
DailyPe is an app through which MSMEs (Micro, small & medium enterprises) get business loans based on their current business revenue. This app is perfect for someone who is running a good enough business & wants to increase their business growth to the next level with capital, which they can repay on a daily instalment basis.
TLDR: This is a loan disbursement app but the instalments that users have to pay are daily.
Why did I choose this project?
As a designer, it always gives me a kick of joy, whenever I see end users using something I design. The other side of this is that my design should also be helpful for them in their daily life. This app met all the checkpoints that were enough for me to work on this project.
Background story
How did I meet the founder?
It started when DailyPe founder Shashwat Shrikhande reached out to me for the design of his idea. At that time DailyPe wasn’t a thing, he wanted to work on some other ideas so that he could pitch in with a prototype.
The idea
We worked on a few ideas but at last DailyPe worked for him in market research. The idea was to help MSMEs with capital so they could grow their business. Expectations from the product were simple from the business side-
- An app where DailyPe can onboard users.
- An app where users can propose their loan requirements.
- An app where users can see their loan details.
- An app where users can pay instalments daily.
This is where I started my job (Research & Design)
Initially to begin with I wanted to check out the target users & competitions that are there in the market. This would help me to get inspiration & save time in direct research.
Who are our target users?
Shashwat told me that he wanted to target MSMEs owners who are looking for capital for their businesses. Now few things are common that he & I observed in these people that are (We also call this ‘User Personas’)—
- They are not highly educated & not familiar with complex English words.
- They are using smartphones in their daily life.
- They are mostly sitting in their shop & run it by themselves.
- They make a minimum of 2000-5000 rupees easily daily.
- They are using online payment modes in their shop.
Is there any competition in the market?
So there is no direct competition who is doing daily repayments, but there are a few indirect competitors like Navi & Kredit Bee.
So I studied these apps & saw how they are onboarding users & making a delightful experience for them.
To access all the screens of these apps, I referred to YouTube videos on these apps & also got a few screens from here & there.
Observations from the Navi & Kredit Bee app
As I said these apps are not our direct competitors but they do the loan disbursement. I’ve observed a few mental models of Indian users from these apps
Things they are doing right
- Onboarding of these apps are same as other apps. They don’t want users to learn new behaviour.
- They added a trust factor across the app, like certifications & to show this platform is safe & secure.
- Customer support is on most of the screens. This is for helping customers at each step.
Principles & values of our app
Before we started working on our product, we needed to set some principles for the app, where we all can align to what we are building & whom we are building for.
1. Don’t reinvent the wheel
As we saw our user is someone who is not very tech-savvy & he has mostly used other loan apps. So, we don’t want our users to have an extra knowledge of digital behaviour to use our app.
2. This app should behave & sound like a loan agent
For our users, we don’t want to sound like a bot or software. We want this app to be as helpful as it can be at each step.
3. Multi-language support
This app should support all Indian languages or at least the area that we are targeting. Also, the translation should be personalised enough for them. So it can feel like a real human is talking to them.
Finally, we are on the screen
For the design & app flow, I mostly worked with Saurabh Gupta, who is the Co-founder of DailyPe & heading the tech team. He & I worked together in creating the tech & design architecture of the app.
1. Roots of the App (IA)
After gathering the data we headed over to make the information architecture for the app like how the user will navigate & how they will onboard with the least effort possible.
Visual Design & Guidelines
Since this is the initial phase of the design, I didn’t want to create a strict style guide for the app.
Initially, I created the logo & used blue colour (This was their owner’s preferred colour). You can learn more about the logo here
Typography
The only reason for choosing Poppins was that it supports the multi-languages of India & easy on the eye
Colours
The base colour for this app was already decided by the founders ‘The Blue’. But to use it in the UI, I created the shades of the basic Primitive colours.
I also made them in the tokens, so that later we can use these colours based on the use cases & give specific names to the colours.
Iterations
There were lots of initial ideas that were thrown into the bin. But a few laid the foundations of the final design. So to test these ideas our team tried to use the prototypes with the family members with the same personas & also few prototypes were tested with the local vendors. You can look at the few concepts below-
In the process of creating for the users that I had in mind, I thought I needed to create something bold & everything should be big enough to catch the user's eyes.
But there was no need to create everything in bold & also assist users everywhere. With this learning, we made the final version that is serving our users now.
The Final Design
Now it’s time to validate all the points & insights that I told you in the whole case study so far.
So, the design you will see is in Hindi primarily, as most of the users gonna use it in Hindi. That’s why I want you to feel the app in the same language. And this will be for Android only, we haven’t launched for IOS.
User Onboarding
Remember when I said, ‘We will not reinvent the wheel’. That’s why user onboarding is as simple as other platforms have.
- We are asking for a PAN card to give the loan amount recommendations based on the user’s credit.
- Contact number to get the user account validation.
Loan Application
In the loan application, we need most of the data about the users & although there is a lot of information we are asking for, I wanted to chunk it down into different related steps & also let users be aware of the progress of the application.
- I added a progress bar on the top to track the loan application process.
- I gave the language change option on each screen as this is crucial for them in the whole process if they don’t understand certain Hindi words, they can switch the language.
- The customer support option is also there throughout the whole process, if they find any difficulty, they can contact support.
Get money in the bank (After approval)
This journey starts after the approval of the loan where we ask for the bank account from the users and also Setup Autopay for daily repayments.
Now I know people are not reading the heading & subheading, so they might miss the important text on the Setup Autopay screen.
To setup the autopay we will deduct ₹1 from your account. We will credit this amount back after autopay setup.
In other apps, they are gonna see ₹15,000. This might get them to think ‘Is this platform gonna deduct this much amount from my account’ & we could see a drop-off here.
To tackle this I show them a pop-up which explains how Autopay works. This pop-up will show even after the user hasn’t done the Setup in another app & returned to our app.
In your selected app you might see ₹15,000 in payment, but don’t worry we will deduct ₹1 only from your account for setup autopay.
After the loan starts, track loan & instalment details
We want users to be incentivised for their daily repayment behaviour. So we decided to go with this formula
If the user pays instalments continuously for 40 days then we can give them a loan top-up
Also from the Homepage, they can track all the details about the loan & instalments
If users want to pay by themselves
There can be a use case where users want to pay the instalment by themselves or want to pay the default/pending money. Then they can do it through the app itself.
Use cases of the homepage for different types of users
We are showcasing loan details and statuses of different types of users. We want to cover that in the design as well. So, I’ve divided the homepage into 4 types of use cases
- Customer Acquisition — We want users to get the loan.
- Customer Retention — We want to reward users & encourage them to take more loans (if required).
- Instalment Paid- Instalment paid by the user or through Autopay.
- Default User — The user is not paying or missed an instalment.
Let's see how I cover these use cases on the Homepage.
Testing it on the call & real users
The kind of users we are dealing with, we can’t expect them to comment or give feedback on the design or the flow.
So we have just observed & are observing their behaviour to improve the platform. Overall response from them was great & they are still using the platform for all their loan needs.
Currently, we are catering only for users who are in Gujarat & Rajasthan.
Business Metrics (As of Dec 2023)
I always want both the users & company in a win-win situation.
This is it from my side, see you on the canvas😉
