Reduced Unqualified Applications by 40% Without Reducing Lead Capture

Timeline: 2 weeks

Role: UX designer

Tools: Figma, ira,

Context

Dohzy is a fintech company focused on providing financial services for the African diaspora in Canada.

Onboarding experience needed a redesign to reduce unqualified applications, lower manual review workload, and set clearer expectations for new immigrants applying for short-term loans.

My role

I was the sole UX designer on this project and collaborated directly with the founder.

My responsibilities included:

  • Reviewing analytics and existing onboarding

  • Identifying friction and support pain points

  • Designing a new onboarding strategy

  • Improving UX writing and communication touchpoints

screensht of zoom

Problem

Dohzy was frustrated with the high volume of unqualified applications.

This created serious operational challenges:

  • Manual application reviews by a tiny team

  • Time spent sending rejection emails

  • Growing customer support requests

  • Operational cost wasted on applicants who could never qualify

Because the company is small, every unqualified application had a real cost.

The applicant felt unsupported when they needed help the most

Users of financial products have a different relationship with expectations than other industries.

Many applicants:

  • Didn’t fully understand eligibility requirements

  • Applied in urgent financial distress

  • Expected instant approval like payday lenders

  • Contacted support for clarification

The Existing Experience (Before)

Users invested effort into applying before learning they were not eligible.

Problems:

  • No expectation setting

  • No eligibility education

  • No pre-qualification

  • Users rejected at the end of the process

1-Current onboarding flow (or pdf)

2-empathy map

Goal

“I only want us to review legible applications from now on!”

Solution

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We adopted a new onboarding strategy

The current approach was to get as many users as possible for the benefit of collecting data on what users needed and how they responded to the product.

Now the strategy focuses on the following:

What makes them credible

what are the criteria??

↩ Customers need an opportunity for exploration & consistent updates

😑 Lack of new items can create a negative experience

🔔 Notifications about relevant deals and new arrivals are desired

🤝 Build trust, familiarity, and consistent positive experiences to foster a loyal relationship

User flow

Shortening the journey to your favourite brand, while extending the exploration beyond

constant communication, set expectation, explain it plainly

Current flow

New flow

Wireframes

After sketching, I created low-fidelity wireframes on Figma…

Wireframe 1st round

As I began to prepare for the high fidelity designs, I noticed some of the design elements needed to be refined.

High fidelity designs

Adopting their visual identity

Since Bicester Village already has an app, I kept the visual identity to ensure cohesion throughout.

Reflection

I’m happy with what was able to complete in a short timeframe

  • My initial concepts were derailed due to the information shared by the employee - I should have contacted them during the research phase of this project.

  • Referring to Emily’s ‘commentary’ (the user persona) throughout the process provided so much clarity!

  • I’ll revisit this project to give more time to smoother prototypes.

Next project

An Interactive Commerce Display to Encourage Environmental Awareness