A client approached me with a salary advance service idea that wasn’t reaping the results they expected.

Their goal was to penetrate a lucrative but risky money-lending market in South East Asia. Using the employer as the underwriter they wanted to reduce their financial risks of lending to those who needed credit but didn’t have a credit history. For some reason, their app wasn’t generating enough traction and they were up against a tight deadline to show results.

It was frustrating. South East Asia is home to hundreds of millions of people in demand of the service, their sales team successfully signed partnerships with businesses in the region and their signups were on par with what they expected.

People need our product but don’t want to use it. It’s ugly and hard to understand

What could be so hard about loans, I thought, talking to their product owners and existing customers. Although the product worked functionally and the business had its clients hooked, it failed in the most basic – why would someone use it.

The interface was definitely faceless, not easy to comprehend, and with a high usability error-rate, as we later found. That did not help with generating trust, but beggars can’ be choosers product leadership argued.

This wasn’t the client’s first attempt at a redesign. They had previously invested into usability studies and getting a UI designer to “add color” to the app. When I suggested we needed to revisit user research, they felt skeptical. Having agreed to take a closer look a the UI, I dived into the problem.

Approach

The easiest part of the project was working through app’s usability issues. We installed UX Cam – a way to track user behavior in the app and improved upon screens where we saw most friction. These changes were no-brainers.

We ran comprehension tests to benchmark user understanding of the service. We did it to address a hypothesis support was seeing: people felt cheated because they didn’t understand loan terms when signing up. In order to improve the metrics we rewrote most of copy, switched the main font to a more geometric one and replaced one-off imagery sprinkled throughout the app with a library of crisp, cohesive icons.

We’ve also introduced sound effects into the app for making key flows like signing a contract or paying back the loan feel more significant and delightful at the finish line. This made the feel more modern, but the underlying emotional trauma persisted.

The product did not attempt to understand the underlying emotions of guilt and fear people felt when using it. We had a great idea people needed but for some reason they still didn’t want to use it.

During the initial phase of the project, I studied region’s cultural texts and did guerilla-level research with company’s junior employees on Slack living in the area, to eventually convince the leadership to reconsider studying the underlying factors that were ruining their business.

The key insight we’ve uncovered – users hated themselves for using us.

The product was built without a clue about how users felt about using the service.

As I probed our target users I insisted a product manager accompanied me during the interviews conducted. Our conversations focused on basic understanding of why the users needed to utilize Nova and how they felt about financial technology like Nova.

These conversations were usually tricky and stressful, however, these are he instances where most profound human wisdom gets to be uncovered. As one user put it:

“I’m glad for my employer to provide this benefit for me, however, I feel that anyone actually utilizing it is doing something wrong with their life.”

Another crucial user insight was:

“Whenever I use the service and owe you money, I find it agonizing. Getting daily reminders that I owe someone money is hell to me.“

So what we discovered was that we had a user base with a cultural background that saw loans as taboo. Something that was shaken off by suggesting a younger generation isn’t as superstitious. But on top of that the feeling of shame associated with someone owing money was obvious during our study. No wonder customers didn’t want to use the app, let alone refer their friends and family to us.

So we needed to figure out a user need and motivation that would offset the tradeoffs of shame and guilt associated with being in debt. We took inventory. We had a great business idea that was met with resistance from the very user base it was meant to help. The barrier was cultural. We had to overcome their feelings of shame and fear in order for them to attempt to see the app as valuable in their life. How do we nudge them to do that?

Every interviewee was asked questions regarding their daily lives, probing their motivations to thrive. Eventually we outlined two main tracks: caring for family and thriving in their career.

I picked out 4 key screens to redesign with a problem statement in mind: as a user, I want to feel confident about utilizing a financial technology that my parents wouldn’t approve of. Framing a problem this way allowed my design to capture confidence, change of generational guard, family-oriented and young professional demographic and last but not least trust and confidence that was the underlying promise of the product.

Solution

Following 3 weeks of hands-on pixel work, I had 5 design concepts with varying degrees on a self-sustainability to family-focus spectrum. We ran quantitative tests with a simple question: “Would you tell your father you are using this app to procure loans to pay for unforeseen expenses in between your paychecks?”

The two options that resonated with users the most are below. Users valued a friendly high-tech UI and the care and comfort approached conveyed.

The final interface combined the imagery of caring for loved ones, the feeling of a “safety cushion,” and the employer’s reliability as a guarantor. Most importantly, there was a reason for them taking on a loan they could justify at a family dinner.

One user said:

“This app inspires trust, everything here is easy and clear. It makes me think of my daughter after a day of hard work”

Result

After the redesign, the app saw increased usage. We succeeded in product no longer being perceived as a dry technology that was nice to have but rarely utilized. Instead we became a tool of growth and trust between employees and employers, strengthening employee loyalty and making companies that offered an earned wage benefit more attractive.

The key to our success lay not in the technology itself, but in how we connected the tech to people it was meant to serve. A design that spoke to people in the language of their values — care, stability, and confidence.

We designed a plush, reassuring experience for family-minded users who rely on earned wage access to support their loved ones with empathy. Our goal wasn’t simple: wrap trust and safety in a warm, meaningful experience, turning financial tools into something that felt reliable and human.

By centering our users’ biggest concerns, we built a peace-of-mind experience that made managing family needs feel secure and approachable. Business stared to make money. In a region where many live paycheck to paycheck and distrust traditional banks, this technology had enormous potential to provide capital to those investing it the right way.