There was a lot of room for improvement with this one. We knew from the beginning that we wanted to move on from email and reframe how we would present the updates. We had some issues with email earlier in the year so becoming less reliant on them would be ideal.

As I said earlier, storytelling is powerful. I wanted people to be able to tell their own stories, from their own perspectives. So on the borrower’s side of things, we wanted to allow them to use the platform as they knew it, and we’d try to handle everything on the backend.

Now, moving onto our users. The stories of our borrowers were powerful on their own. We felt that we did not have to sell people on this idea, rather we needed to present it better. I pitched it as “putting our best foot forward”. We wanted there to be more visibility for this reimagined experience as well as an actionable item to create a more meaningful experience for our borrowers & our users.

I went on to create some wireframes for our updated feature. We looked to social media platforms such as Twitter & Facebook to create a "mini feed” of updates. Our goal was to get people back on Kiva & create a natural loop bringing in more people through sharing of these updates.

The primary challenge I encountered was with positioning - there were other experiments on the borrower profile. I collaborated with other project managers & designers to find a placement that would not interfere with the other experiments & tailored my new experience to account for this.