Independent Juggler
"I do my budgets weekly. £100 go to the banks for the bills per week. But if someone does not pay me at the end of the week, then I need to move things around."
Case Study · Penny · Financial Companion for Near Prime Customers
A retail giant asked if it could become a financial services company. The research said yes, but only if we designed for protection, not freedom. This is the story of what happened when we listened.
The Finding That Changed Everything
Littlewoods was a household name in retail credit, buy now, pay later, for decades. But the market was shifting. Competitors were moving into financial services, open banking was emerging, and a growing, underserved group of near prime customers were falling through the cracks of both retail credit and mainstream lending.
The Spread the Cost Card, the product the client most wanted to build, was rejected by 10 out of 11 participants. Not because it was badly designed. Because it removed the barriers users had spent years building to protect themselves from their own impulses.
"Even people with the strictest regimen and budget have a hard time controlling themselves, especially with revolving accounts. People prefer the control to be in the hand of the retailer, so they are not given the choice to spend."
Research synthesis · 11 participants across Manchester and London"Oh god! I would stay away from the card, otherwise I would go shopping! It would always be in my purse!"
HAD4, research participantProduct Context
The product the client most wanted to build was the one users most feared. Freedom was not a benefit to this audience. It was a threat to the self protection strategies they had spent years building.
Design Principle
Design for protection, not access. For near prime users, guardrails are the feature, not an obstacle to it.
My Role
The research phase was complete when I arrived. Two UX Researchers had run 11 in depth home interviews and a YouGov quantitative survey of 1,575 British consumers across 23 potential features, using an Opportunity Score model to identify the largest gaps between what users needed and what the market was providing.
Near prime customers, those with limited access to mainstream credit, returned an average Opportunity Score of 9.07, against 7.55 for all interest payers. The audience was underserved. The data confirmed it. I was brought in at the point where insight had to become architecture.
Two technical moments carried a disproportionate amount of trust: Open Banking and KYC. They were not just requirements to complete. They were moments where users would decide whether Penny understood their situation, respected their privacy, and was safe enough to continue with.
The People We Were Designing For
The research team developed four behavioural archetypes from the interviews, defined not by demographics but by three variables: ability to plan ahead, risk taking tendency, and knowledge of credit. I used them throughout the design process as lenses, not labels. Every decision went through them.
Needs: External guardrails
She is in her overdraft most months, uses retail credit for daily expenses, and knows she should not always spend but cannot always stop herself. She wants the product to carry some of that responsibility for her.
Needs: Flexibility
Income fluctuates weekly. Some clients pay late, some do not pay at all. He uses credit as a buffer, not a spending mechanism, and manages his finances with meticulous weekly budgets.
Needs: Shared control
Makes financial decisions jointly with her husband. Pays all her bills on the same day so she always knows what is left. Values transparency, dislikes surprises, and wants to adjust payments as circumstances change.
Needs: A path forward
Credit averse by temperament, but she needs a mortgage and that means building a credit history. Wants to use credit carefully, track her progress, and improve, not just manage where she is.
Independent Juggler
"I do my budgets weekly. £100 go to the banks for the bills per week. But if someone does not pay me at the end of the week, then I need to move things around."
Responsible Controller
"I pay my bills all at the same time so I know how much I have left to spend for the rest of the month"
Tempted Struggler
"Life is for living. I am telling myself I am responsible but I am not the best. [...] I know I have to stay home but I can’t cut on my social life, so I’ll get a drink with friends over the weekend."
Cautious Saver
"You get credit for a reason. If it was for a car, or a holiday (...) otherwise you are tempted to spend it for anything and everything."
Aligning the Business with the Research
I facilitated a Design Thinking workshop with the client to put the research findings on the table alongside the business pressures: growth targets, competitive threats, and the need to justify investment in a new vertical. This was not a presentation. It was a working session with findings on one side, business constraints on the other, and the task of finding where they could meet.
By the end, we had alignment. The app would not be about giving users more freedom. It would be about giving them support at the right moment, in the right way.
With direction agreed, I ran an internal scenarios workshop to identify the key moments where Penny's help was most needed. We narrowed to two journeys that captured the core tension of the project, one reactive and one proactive, alongside a third retention layer that would keep users engaged over time.
The Card Sort
Six participants. Three days. The results were clarifying. We used the card sort to understand how customers grouped financial needs, where they expected to find help, and what kind of product or solution they would look for after onboarding.
That mattered because the app was not just a set of journeys. It needed an architecture customers could recognise at the moment they were deciding what to do next. If users could not see where a solution belonged, the product would feel like another financial system asking them to decode it.
The card sort showed which concepts belonged together, which decisions needed guidance, and where a customer would expect to go after onboarding. That gave the app a clearer destination: not a dashboard full of financial terms, but a guided home for the next useful action.
The direction shifted. We were not just designing a financial app. We were designing a way to communicate.
Terms tested but not understood
APRRevolving creditRefinancingCredit limitVariable rate
Product Context
The problem was not just the journeys. It was where those journeys lived and how customers expected to find the right kind of help after onboarding.
Design Principle
Use the architecture to guide the next useful action. Help customers recognise the right route before asking them to choose a financial product.
Conversation had to come before architecture.
The principle that changed the entire interface approach
Designing the Journeys
Journey 1: Reactive
A bill is coming. The user is short. How do we catch them before they fall?
The research showed that users were comfortable sharing banking data as long as they understood what they were getting in return. The design had to earn that comfort before asking for it. Open banking does its work in the background, experienced as better options shaped around the user's situation.
Journey 2: Proactive
A new user wants to borrow but doesn't understand APR. How do we educate without overwhelming?
Know Your Customer is a regulatory requirement. For many near prime users, it is also the moment they abandon a financial product entirely. Penny's KYC flow does the opposite of the cold standard pattern. The ID scan opens with warm, human guidance. The next screen shows details auto populated, with one clear CTA: "My details are correct."
The Design Principle That Tied Everything Together
The card sort showed that customers were not looking for products in the way the business described them. They were looking for help with situations: covering a shortfall, understanding what they could afford, or knowing what to do after onboarding.
A data led interface assumes users can interpret financial information and act on it. Our users needed the product to organise decisions around recognisable moments of need. Once that was visible, it changed the information architecture, the copy direction, and the structure of every journey.
So instead of presenting data, we asked questions. Instead of menus, we offered choices. Instead of dashboards, we built dialogues. Instead of treating rejection as a terminal state, we made it the beginning of a different conversation.
The conversational tone: sample interactions
Validation
Conversational tone received as genuinely empathetic. Users consistently described Penny as feeling like it was on their side, not corporate, not selling.
Stay on Track seen as help, not restriction. Users who expected to feel constrained by spending controls instead felt supported by them. The framing made the difference.
Rejection and credit score education turned a dead end into a path forward. Participants who were declined felt the interaction was fair and constructive, the opposite of most lending experiences.
User choice over what to refinance. We initially had the system select which payment to refinance. Users asked for this control themselves, unprompted. They had better knowledge of future purchases than the algorithm did.
Refinancing usage limit added. Users asked for this guardrail themselves, unprompted. They wanted protection from their own potential overuse of the feature.
The Outcome
Complete flows demonstrating a cohesive financial companion experience for near prime users: reactive crisis support, structured onboarding, and a credit coaching retention layer.
The design proved that near prime users could be served with empathy, and that empathy was commercially viable.
The agency was awarded the broader project to design and develop Littlewoods' full financial lending vertical.
What I Carry Forward
Users with financial vulnerability have spent years building self protection strategies. Removing those barriers does not liberate them. It exposes them. Design that respects their boundaries is design that serves them.
If users cannot find the kind of help they are looking for, they will not trust the product. The card sort taught me to test how customers understand solutions before committing to an IA direction.
A conversational interface does not just feel friendlier. It helps customers move from a situation they recognise to a route they can act on. Guiding users through questions gave them a path forward without asking them to diagnose the product category first.
The Needs Based Borrowing journey turned loan denial into education. Showing users their credit score with local context and an improvement path transformed a dead end into a route.
The architecture question surfaced later than it should have. Testing how customers looked for products and solutions before wireframing would have given us more runway and challenged the structure before we had committed to it.
In Closing
It was about a retail giant asking a question: can we become a financial services company? The answer was not in features or flows. It was in understanding that for the people we were designing for, help meant something specific. Not more freedom, but better support for the freedom they already had.
The research told us what to build. The card sort told us how to speak. The conversational design that emerged from both gave near prime users something most financial products had never offered them: a product that seemed to be on their side.
We gave them guardrails. We gave them conversation. We gave them a moment of empathy when they needed it most. In doing so, we proved that design could open a door to a new business, not by selling, but by listening.