How Sublime Finance created the notion of credit based on social status

I partnered with Sublime Finance, as their founding design team in order to shape the idea of credit based on social following. During the sprint, I worked closely with the founder and delivered a full MVP design that was tested and iterated with the product's target market.

Goal

Sublime Finance is a platform where anyone can connect their social media account, sign a message, and get access to a pool of money they can lend based on their followers. I was hired to design the platform where lenders and borrowers would interact in order to manage the pools and the amounts that were being lent out.

Challenge

Credit based on social media presence is a very novel concept and the main challenge was conveying this value proposition to users, while at the same time simplifying the pool management features. The solution had to feel very natural to both lenders and borrowers alike.

Solution

During the sprint process, I analyzed requirements and assumptions from the founder and added their own as well. The result was a prototype that focused on both new users and returning users' flows. After a careful iteration test, I delivered the prototype to the Sublime Finance team and featured all the requests and assumptions from the founder, as well as addressing all the inconsistencies found in the usability tests.

Among many things, I discovered that:

It wasn’t clear for lenders when they will get back their loan
It wasn’t clear for lenders when the loan will start
For borrowers they wanted to see a repayment schedule

I solved these by:

Making it clear for lenders when they will expect their loan back and what is the profit
Making it clear for lenders when the loan will start
Designing a timeline of the borrowers repayment schedule