Union Bank of India — B2C Personal Loan Journey

Role

UX Designer

Team

4 PM's, 20 Engineers

Duration

6 months

Tools

Figma, Claude Design & Code

Context & Framing

Union Bank of India needed to modernize its B2C lending journeys, moving customers away from branch-dependent, largely offline processes toward a fully digital experience, while operating under the compliance rigor expected of a public-sector bank (RBI regulation applies strictly, with no flexibility to "move fast and simplify" the way a private fintech might).

I joined the broader program under two senior designers, and after three months took full end-to-end ownership of the Personal Loan journey from requirement gathering through design, testing, and stakeholder sign-off.

The Problem, Backed by Data

UBI's existing Personal Loan journey suffered from poor user experience and high complexity, which meant customers frequently could not complete the digital application on their own. This created two compounding business problems for UBI

  • Customer loss — high drop-off on the digital journey.

  • Continued branch dependency — like many traditional banks, most customers defaulted back to branch-assisted applications, which undermined UBI's broader push to establish a real digital presence.

Research & Discovery

Because direct access to UBI's actual customers wasn't available (a common constraint on client-owned banking engagements), research combined two tracks

Stakeholder-sourced insight:

Sessions with UBI's business team surfaced that users struggled to understand what information was being asked of them, the journey was too long, and critically it broke down mid-flow. On investigation, this wasn't isolated to one weak step: it was systemic. API and credit bureau checks would frequently fail or time out under load, and the journey gave users no sense of where they were or how many steps remained, so any interruption felt like a dead end rather than a temporary delay.

Proxy user research

With direct customer access unavailable, I supplemented this with structured conversations with potential personal-loan customers in my own network to understand real decision criteria and expectations.

Users expect near-instant speed for prequalified loans.

UBI's primary customer base (tier-2/tier-3 cities) needed explanation at every step, nothing could be assumed as "obvious."

The journey needed to feel seamless even for users who are not financially sophisticated assuming users will just "figure out" a form was not a safe design assumption.

Explore

Decision point: How to shorten a journey that legally cannot lose required data

UBI wanted a fully digital journey, but as a public-sector bank under strict RBI regulation, every required data point had to remain in the flow there was no room to simplify by cutting compliance requirements. I explored three directions:

Chosen Design — Restructure into 3 logical macro-stages:

Loan Application → Loan Sanction → Disbursement, each broken into small, digestible sub-tasks with clear progress indication (how many steps remain) and logical field grouping, so users complete related inputs together rather than facing one undifferentiated long form.

Supporting Decision: Graceful failure instead of hard rejection

At any critical decision point where the digital journey might fail (a bureau check, a verification step), rather than hard-rejecting the application, I designed the flow to route the customer to branch-assisted continuation instead. This meant a digital-journey failure never meant total application failure directly protecting against the customer-loss problem that motivated this redesign in the first place.

Converge & Decide

Beyond the macro-structure, I focused on making the journey usable for financially non-expert users specifically:

Maximum data fetched with API's, redused manual document upload and data entries for end user

Simplified, clear payment and mandate option for user

A single, streamlined CKYC flow featuring a search option and a fallback path to proceed without CKYC, ensuring an uninterrupted customer journey.

A clear, guided Account Aggregator flow for income verification, a step that's often confusing even for digitally comfortable users

Every one of these decisions traded a small amount of additional structure/steps for a large reduction in cognitive load consistent with the research finding that tier-2/3 city users needed explanation, not assumption.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

Design sign-off happened directly with UBI stakeholders (AGM/SGM level) before reaching engineering which meant, structurally, engineering had limited room to challenge approved designs once locked. Rather than a negotiation dynamic, collaboration with the 12-person dev team centered on implementation accuracy

I personally tested every page and component post-development in two structured phases. SIT (component and pixel-accuracy testing with dummy data) and UAT (full real-data testing across all realistic scenarios).

Any gap found was raised as a ticket with a clear visual diff and detailed explanation, rather than a vague bug report keeping the dev team's fixes fast and precise.

I ran full UAT journey walkthroughs directly with the Bank's CX team, giving them hands-on exposure to the finished flow.

Visual & System Craft

The design system for this program was a fully collaborative effort across the design team, not something I owned solo — worth stating plainly, since it differs from prior projects where I built the system independently. What I can speak to directly:

  • The system was fully tokenized, supporting consistent scaling across both mobile and desktop versions of every loan journey.

  • It was built to WCAG 2.0 accessibility guidelines — a meaningful constraint given UBI's public-sector, broad-demographic user base, and one that doesn't come up in every commercial fintech project.

I built a complete design system from tokens up — 20+ core components and foundational elements, designed and structured in Figma. To scale this system efficiently across the app's many loan-type flows, I documented the system as a structured reference file and used it as a working skill within Claude — so that once I'd designed a component's foundation (e.g., a card layout), I could generate consistent, on-brand variants of it quickly for the many contexts the app needed (different loan types, different data states) without redesigning each one from scratch.

Validation

Validation on this engagement was structured around SIT and UAT, run directly by me, plus CX team walkthroughs this was the full validation loop available on this client-owned engagement (no separate standalone usability testing round was run beyond this).

SIT confirmed pixel/component accuracy against design; UAT confirmed real-data behavior across scenarios; CX walkthroughs gave the bank's own customer-facing team direct exposure to the finished journey before launch.

Outcome & Impact

As a fully client-owned engagement, specific post-launch business metrics (completion rates, drop-off reduction, branch-vs-digital split) aren't available for external sharing. What can be stated with confidence:

Clear 3-Stage

A previously fragmented, break-prone journey was restructured into a clear 3-stage flow

30 min

Application time reduced from 60–80 minutes

Less Drop Off

A graceful-failure path (branch fallback) was built directly into the journey

~40%

Reduction in clicks

Leadership & Influence

This project was structured under two senior designers leading the broader program, so my role here was individual-contributor rather than team-leadership a different dynamic from projects where I led the design team directly.

My influence was expressed through direct design decisions and stakeholder conversations rather than mentoring most notably in advocating for and securing approval on the branch-fallback approach over a hard-rejection model.

Reflection

The general shape of the challenge on this project wasn't a design tradeoff in the usual sense, it was the ongoing work of building conviction with stakeholders operating under heavy regulatory and institutional risk constraints, for design decisions that prioritized user completion over the bank's default caution.

With great UX comes great responsibility.