UI redesign and design systems for an MCA underwriting platform

Steddy is a merchant cash advance (MCA) underwriting platform for funders — the workflow runs business info to bank statements to AI analysis to decision to contract. I was brought in to lead a UI redesign and ongoing UX on an existing React + Tailwind + shadcn/ui app, operating as an embedded product design partner: diagnosing the product, setting the strategic direction, and delivering everything handoff-ready.

The interface felt too playful and soft for the seriousness of MCA underwriting, which undercut trust in a category where credibility is everything. It needed to evolve into something professional and trustworthy — without a rip-and-replace of a live product I didn't have code access to — while the core underwriting workflow itself needed to be sharpened.

Diagnosed before designing: reviewed the live staging app and ran a full style audit extracting the current design tokens (color, type, spacing, radius, shadows), then named the core problem in the client's own terms.

Set a strategic target — the trust and polish of Wise / Coinbase / Apple — and translated it into concrete moves (pastel gradients to clean neutrals, indigo to dark green, 10px radius to 6px, decorative to functional).

Validated the color direction with evidence, not taste: a competitive audit of LoanWorx, Pathway, SugarAnt, and Dragin (marketing sites and real product screens). The insight — Pathway, the most design-mature rival, owns indigo (Steddy's current color), so moving to green created instant differentiation and claimed green-on-white as open territory.

Built four complete, interactive design-system options (dark green, fresh green, teal, indigo) as coded HTML references — tokens, component showcase, a curated Phosphor icon set for the MCA workflow, spot illustrations, and a full light/dark contrast pass — engineered to ship via a shadcn token-swap rather than a rewrite.

Redesigned the core underwriting workflow, then iterated in tight client loops — a tiered illustration-simplification pass, and an 11-point dashboard feedback round where each request was reviewed for feasibility and risk, flagged, and confirmed before executing.

Delivered a strategy-led redesign as production-ready, interactive artifacts. A style audit and competitive audit packaged as interactive decks; four coded design-system options ready to ship via token swap; three progressively simplified illustration libraries (16 each, light/dark) injected across all four systems; and clickable HTML prototypes of the core screens — a redesigned pipeline dashboard; a 3-step intake flow (business info, bank statements, review) with website-lookup autofill, address autocomplete, QuickBooks-or-upload connection, sequential step gating, and an AI processing overlay that auto-redirects to the dashboard; and a split-panel underwriting dashboard with a sidebar offer calculator, canvas revenue and daily-balance charts, negative-day detection, existing-positions breakdowns, interactive toggles, and a scaffolded final-underwriting state. Every decision was documented with its reasoning, and scope calls were made explicitly — flagging risk, confirming direction, and opting for a clean rewrite when edits grew too interconnected.