RateSetter is one of Australia's leading peer to peer lenders. With over 68,000 members and over $750m in loans funded, We connect savvy investors with creditworthy borrowers.
As the company's first design hire, I looked after the end-to-end design of all products on our platform. This included what it was like to borrow money, and what it was like to invest/lend money.
RateSetter is essentially a two-sided marketplace comprised of "buyers" (borrowers) and "sellers" (lenders). Sometimes they have the same needs. Most of the time they are different.
It is also a finance product which has historically always been complex and difficult to explain and understand.
For our borrowing customers, we strive to be their champions. Helping them understand the fees and costs of borrowing money, and being transparent throughout the process.
For our investing customers, that means helping simplify historically complex and abstract investing systems. We are aim to be legally compliant and transparent with the risks of investing.
At RateSetter, I had a hand in revamping our 5 year-old investor platform. This included redesigning and re-imagining simplified experiences for Desktop, mobile web and native mobile apps.
I also helping increase loan volumes through optimisation of our borrowing experience application funnel. We also launched a new vehicle loan vertical and made improvements in other various acquisition channels (for brokers, renewable energy lending and legal finance).
Finder Ventures / HiveEx
Finder Ventures is the venture capital arm of Finder, created to invest in new ideas and help build amazing companies. It is funded by Finder, one of the world’s leading personal finance comparison websites.
Finder ventures launched in 2018 because the founders wanted to grow new business ideas and build sustainable companies in the future. The projects of Finder ventures revolved around the blockchain / cryptocurrency space.
It was also a way to test and rework the way we build internet products. I looked after the end to end product design and front-end development of most of the projects within Finder Ventures.
Cryptocurrency investors are interesting in that to help them achieve their goals, we have to help them understand not only the traditional financial jargon but also the technical ones around blockchain and security.
Their focus is primarily speed (will i get the price that is quoted) and around trust (do I trust this counter-party to fufill this trade).
At Finder Ventures, we grew products from $0 to over $100m in trade volume and ~$1m in revenue.
We launched an over-the-counter service, a trading dashboard for sophisticated investors, a crypto-to-fiat exchange and facilitated the design and build of other crypto related products.
Finder
Finder is one of Australia's largest comparison site. Every month, over 2.6 million users browse to site to make financial comparisons and learn how to make better decisions.
I joined Finder's design team in 2017 to help work on optimise many of the core pages on the site. This included optimising Finder to make it more mobile friendly to big epics like reimagining Finder's complex navigation for scale and usability.
Finder's business model is being able to monetize popular searched pages on the site. Long form content is one of the keys to helping pages rank.
However, having a lot of content on the page doesn't always equal a great user experience. Being a good designer at Finder means being able to find this balance.
Because design was a relatively new discipline at Finder, being able to navigate difficult conversations and gather buy-in was also a key at being good at your job.
One of the best projects to sell design to the company was the redesign of the review pages which we were able to increase conversion by ~24-40% uplift.
Alongside the product design aspects of Finder, I also designed many of the content pieces on the site. This included online and offline print pieces.
How do you make long-form content engaging, exciting and pleasurable to read on Finder? I think visual design and branding play a big part in getting people interested from the start.
Settl
A prop-tech startup aimed at disrupting the Australian real-estate market. Backed by LJ Hooker. Think Purplebricks but with an Australian flavour.
As part of founding team, i worked with product managers and engineer leads to help develop and refine the product market fit for the Settl product. This included a lot of user research and business case validation.
In the end Settl didn't launch. Many of the bones and learnings however did not go to waste and is currently being used in the upside.com.au product.
Freelancer.com
The world’s largest freelancing and crowd-sourcing marketplace. Helping connect over 40 million entrepreneurs and freelancers together.
As part of a design team of 6. I worked in the user acquisition teams. Here i was able to earn my stripes in landing page design, customer signups, user on-boarding and conversion optimisation in general.
Later I transitioned into the matchmaking team. Matchmaking is experience of the employer trying to find and match with the best freelancer for their project. This included working on search, chat and messaging and also payments (escrow) for employers.
I also designed many of the Tshirts, hackathons and events for the company. These were great team building events and were very fun to do!
