Clicklease · 2021 – 2023
Getting small businesses funded faster
As Principal Product Designer and head of product design on Clicklease’s founding product team, I helped a bootstrapped fintech figure out who it served, then rebuilt the flows that decide whether a small business gets its equipment — application, signing, communications and the customer portal.
The two-minute version
- Clicklease had grown fast on a founder-built product. Customers with thin credit were getting lost in long forms, confusing e-signatures and silence after they signed.
- We started with the company’s identity — who are we, who do we serve — then used surveys, interviews, 300+ call recordings and funnel data to pick four initiatives, sequenced by impact and cost.
- Redesigning the application took it from 43 actions to 15 or fewer and the submit rate from 19% to 56%; the new signing flow nearly tripled open-signing-to-fund. I also set up how design worked with product and engineering.
A fast-growing fintech, still running in startup mode.
Clicklease does “buy now, pay later” for small-business equipment. Picture a food-truck owner who needs a new espresso machine: the seller offers Clicklease at checkout, and the business pays it off monthly. Leases run from about $500 to $20,000, and many customers have credit scores under 650 and little time in business — the people traditional lenders turn away.
The founders had bootstrapped the product and it worked well enough to grow. But growth exposed the seams: an application that took 43 actions to complete, a signing process that lost most people between “docs opened” and “funded,” a customer portal so clunky it had been hidden and then switched off, and a support team that found out about problems when customers called.
The executives hired a product team — me and four other founding members — to clarify who the company was and map out the next two years.
Three parties, real money, and a lot of reasons to say no.
Multi-party by nature
Every lease involves a merchant, a customer and Clicklease’s own underwriting, fraud, funding and support teams — each with different goals and different information.
Risk pulls against simplicity
Fraud prevention, risk requirements and legal disclosures all add steps. Removing friction without removing safeguards was the actual job.
The customers are underserved
Little credit history, previous rejections, not much time. They expect a consumer-grade experience and assume the worst when things go quiet.
No shared picture
No single source of truth, outdated email triggers, and call-center reason codes that were often wrong. We had to reconstruct what was really happening.
Leases last years
Getting funded is the start, not the end. Payments, early payoff and delinquency scenarios all needed designing too.
Head of product design, and the person drawing the screens.
I led design on a small founding product team and managed a couple of designers — setting how design, product and engineering worked together — while doing a lot of the research and design hands-on. On the customer portal I was the product designer and UX researcher.
What I owned
- Managing a small design team, and setting design culture and process: research practice, design sprints, prioritization with product, and how design fed engineering sprints
- Research: surveys, interviews, call listening, funnel analysis with FullStory, UserTesting and Google Analytics
- End-to-end design of the application, doc signing and customer portal — flows, edge cases, UI and prototypes
- Personas and value proposition work to answer “who do we serve?” for the whole company
What the wider team owned
- Product management and roadmap (Kelly Madsen)
- Engineering and delivery (Edgar Salas and team)
- Underwriting, fraud and risk rules; legal disclosures
- Support and sales operations, Salesforce administration
Start with who we are. Then who we serve.
Before touching a screen, we had a more basic question to answer as a company: who are we, and who do we serve? We ended up with two people we designed for. Rose — a small-business owner ready to buy, overlooked by traditional lenders. Edgar — an equipment dealer whose customers need financing but can’t get it. Lined up against what traditional equipment lenders require, the value proposition wrote itself.
Then the research. The company had been saving a lot of data; we dug through it and added our own:
- Survey responses from customers and merchants
- 100+
- Interviews with “Roses” and “Edgars”
- 30+
- Support calls listened to
- 300+
- Call-center tagging — often wrong, which was a finding in itself
- Reason codes
Four initiatives, two at a time.
We synthesized the findings into action items, weighed them against development cost and time, and sequenced four initiatives: (1) improve the application and (2) rework doc signing first, then (3) a communications audit and (4) payments and the customer portal. No big-bang redesign — each piece had to ship and prove itself.
Cut the application from 43 actions to 15 — and make it the first fraud gate.
The original form asked for everything, up front, in one long page. We went through three versions, each measured. The biggest idea in V3 was a mobile credential: start with a phone number and the last four of your SSN, prefill what we can, and use that same step as the first fraud check — replacing checks that used to interrupt people later in the journey. It also gave the rest of the company a reliable identifier for Rose.
- User actions to apply
- 43 → ≤15
- Application submit rate
- 19% → 56%
- Completion time (V2 → V3)
- 4:31 → 3:23
Mobile credential: prefill, fraud gate and a solid identifier in one step.
A/B testing progress-timeline options on mobile.
Rebuild signing around what people are worried about.
Signing is where approved customers quietly disappeared. The old flow dropped people into an ACH form, then a third-party signing tool with its own limitations, with no sense of where they were or what happened next. We designed our own signing experience (“Clicksign”) inside the constraints of the ESIGN Act and active agreements: a welcome back, clear payment options, bank details, signature, then an explicit “here’s what happens now.”
- Open signing → funded
- 11% → 29%
- Application start → funded, end to end
- 1% → 3%
Signing flow with verification and co-signer branches.
The shipped signing steps on mobile.
Design the customer portal for the next five years, not the next five minutes.
A lease can run for years. The original portal was so ineffective it had been hidden from customers and then deactivated — which meant every “how much do I owe?” became a phone call. We ran a design sprint to align stakeholders, and found two big buckets of problems: finalizing the purchase (“I signed… now what? When does my equipment ship?”) and payments (how much, when, can I change the date, pay early, pay extra, what happens if I miss one).
The original portal. The sticky note was not subtle.
Real customer questions from calls and interviews.
Design every scenario the back office already knows about.
The happy path is the easy part. Clicklease’s Salesforce data described every state a lease could actually be in — current and in good standing, caught up but with a fee outstanding, delinquent by one payment, delinquent by several. We mapped each scenario to what the portal should show and let customers do, reviewed them with the teams who handle those cases, and prototyped and tested until we agreed a viable MVP.
Portal flows mapped per account scenario.
“Revelations”: where the data and the design disagreed.
The portal, shipped.
Mobile-first, because that’s where Rose is — usually on a job site.
Log in with the same mobile credential used to apply.
Home answers “what happens next?”
Payment schedule, including the uncomfortable states.
One-time and extra payments without a phone call.
Lease detail with documents and early purchase option.
Leases and in-flight applications side by side.
Repeat customers can find sellers who offer Clicklease.
And it scales up to tablet and desktop.
Enough process to be fast. No more.
Part of my job was running a small design team and deciding how a five-person product team should work. We didn’t need a design ops department; we needed a few habits that made good decisions cheap:
- Research with receipts. Surveys, interviews and call listening, synthesized into findings everyone could point at — especially when they contradicted what we assumed.
- Design sprints for alignment. Five days from problem framing to tested prototype, with stakeholders in the room instead of reviewing it afterwards.
- Prioritize in the open. MoSCoW with product, weighed against development cost, so “why aren’t we doing X?” had a visible answer.
- Design that fits into delivery. A refinement document mapped designs to development tickets, so each sprint brought a live piece of the puzzle.
- Measure everything we ship. FullStory, UserTesting and funnel metrics on every version — which is why this page has numbers on it.
Design sprint plan.
Synthesis board.
UserTesting study on non-leasable items.
Measurably better, and positioned to grow.
- Application submit rate
- 19% → 56%
- Open signing to funded
- 11% → 29%
- Faster time-to-finance, on average
- 11 days
- Year-over-year growth the work set the company up for — even in a turning economy
- 135%
More applicants finished, more signers got funded, and they got there faster — on average 11 days sooner. Start-to-fund conversion tripled (1% → 3%). The customer portal went from switched off back into customers’ hands, built around the questions they used to call about. Just as important, Clicklease came out with a shared answer to “who do we serve?” and a product team that knew how to research, prioritize and ship — which set the company up for 135% year-over-year growth.
What this project says about how I work.
Design leadership
Setting up how design, product and engineering work together on a founding team.
B2B / fintech UX
Multi-party workflows where risk, legal and simplicity all have a vote.
Outcome-driven
Three measured iterations instead of one big reveal.
Strategy
Starting from “who are we and who do we serve?” before drawing a screen.