Kiva + UserTesting

According to Meg Gloudemans, Senior User Researcher, “Kiva's whole model relies on people around the world coming together to fund these loans. Otherwise there's no funding source. As the Product Design Team, we needed to make it easier for new visitors to the website to choose loans, and also help existing donors re-lend their money when they come back to the site.” 

The team used Figma to mock up potential design solutions for a revamped lending platform and then worked with the UserTesting platform to investigate the behaviors and perceptions of potential lenders. This is some of what they found in their experiments:

• Heat maps highlighted where visitors clicked on the pages and helped the team understand which information to surface
• The team had assumed that fewer options on screen would reduce decision fatigue, but they actually found the opposite. Showing more borrowers and projects on a single page made the search experience more pleasant (and required fewer clicks) for potential lenders
• Potential lenders responded positively to a new section entitled “Borrowers we think you’ll like.” Aspects that appeal to customers who visit popular consumer websites work for non-profits, too!
• Showing loans that were almost fully-funded enticed visitors to select those options, to fill the colored horizontal bar on the page and complete borrowers’ loan requirements 

Ultimately, these insights led to Kiva developing and releasing a new website with significant changes to the way loan options appear to visitors. 

Kiva’s online platform runs more smoothly than ever, as customers can easily find loan opportunities that appeal to them. Since the team updated the website, conversion has increased by 7.5%. Lenders have added $600,000 in new money into the system, and those dollars have funded 7,000 new borrowers. 

Olly Farshi believes that changes to the platform based on customer perceptions helped the company achieve its mission. “At Kiva, human insight leads to net good. I hope that every day in the work that we're doing, we leave the world genuinely a little better than it was at the beginning of the day.”