Tools for a personalised financing

PATA Finance is an affiliate of the PATA Group, one of the largest vertically integrated companies in the Baltics with a broad presence in the forest sector in Latvia.

PATA Finance was born out of the lack of a specialised financing provider in the forest and agriculture sector that understands the needs of clients searching for financial support and can provide fast, affordable and efficient financing when it is really needed.

Challenges & problems

Create a proper design system for existing products maintaining the company's style and branding. The goal was to create a completely new user dashboard with all new functionality and features while at the same time also thinking of the front page sections that needed some spicing up.

In the dashboard itself, pie chart was created as the main graphic element, that visualizes the full loan amount and main action buttons for fast usage. Like with many dashboards, the typical challenges always are related to the large amount of data that needs to be displayed. And especially because this product is related to financial attributes, all of this information is very sensitive to users and needs to be displayed mindfully. 

Process & approach

While the public sections didn’t require much wireframing, our design team knew exactly what to do to make things a little better for this part of the project. Together with creating design screens a large scale design system was created to make sure that we have all the tools for the rest of the upcoming updates.

When it comes to the internal dashboard, the client already had a good idea of what the sections of the dashboard might look like, so our job was to make sure that everything was created and aligned with the best practices of good usability principles. Product is quite complex so multiple sessions with stakeholders were required. But even with many internal discussions it was clear that we are not the best suited people to judge what’s been created so a series of on-site user tests were held with people that have already used PATA Finance before or plan to use it. User testing was done with a clickable prototype of the newly created dashboard tool.

In these tests it was clear that 75% of people would use the tool as part of their daily workflow so it can help them better see the status of their properties and loans. Qualitative user tests showed a good insight both to project designers and stakeholders of what users actually think about when working with this dashboard.

Solutions

With the help of the initial research phase where some of the ideas were brainstormed and tested, we managed to create good deliverables in design. After working on all of the public and internal profile screens, it was clear for both us and the client exactly how powerful this tool will be once it will be launched. And that already proved in our qualitative user testing that the majority of people would add this homepage as part of their daily routine.