Mahila Money is a fintech app that is specially designed for women in Tier 2 and 3 cities. The goal for this app is to empower women who don't come from a very sound financial background, by the means of community engagement, financial awareness and help provide small loans for their business.

Users might download the app to get access to the fintech aspect of the app but user retention would be greatly helped by building a community. Currently, The users of the platform are not engaging with the community section very much because of two major reasons:

• Users aren’t able to see the content they want to

• The post creation process (flow) is too cumbersome

Since a large majority of the users are from suburban/rural areas, modern design techniques are possibly not the best route. Simplicity and immediate feedback on user action is paramount.

While doing user research and attending several live events, I observed that the users are not very technologically literate. Which means that complicated modern user interfaces that are optimised for aesthetics over functionality and intuitiveness are not a good idea here.

Keeping that in mind, we did some market research into applications that are focused more on a suburban/ rural demographic. Some inspiration was drawn from apps like sharechat and frnd, which also cater to the same target audience.

Some of the insights I gathered during my research are:


• Users have difficulties understanding the post flow and different types of post creation options present in the app


• A good percentage of users on the platform seemed to not be well educated. They could operate the app by themselves but needed guidance in loan applications and other financial matters


• Nested features often led to poor discoverability and made the app less intuitive to work with


Current app language is English/ Hinglish, which could be another barrier to entry. Supporting regional languages will go a long way towards making the app more accessible. A lot of applications that cater to tier 2 & 3 cities do so.

Due to time constraints, I had to make a few assumptions about the userbase. Eg. user types, their financial goals and literacy rates. Also a few other assumptions on their socio-economic conditions like - having uninterrupted access to internet, phone, etc were taken.

With this information, I focused on fixing the biggest issues which are:

• Give users a better community experience by giving them personalised/filtered feed

• Simplify the post creation flow

• Implement a minimal and direct design style

To make the app more visual overall because language shouldn’t be a barrier to communication