Oraan Accelerator

Last Mile Money was a 5-year partnership funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation focused on connecting underserved communities to the digital economy. In 2023, Last Mile Money and IDEO partnered to create an accelerator program to enable start-ups to scale their digital financial services in emerging markets, with a particular focus on reaching women.

Oraan, a women-led Pakistani start-up, was one of five start-ups selected for the accelerator sprint in Autumn 2023. They are creating a digital platform for the previously in-person-only concept of ‘saving circles.’ These circles are trustworthy groups of friends, family, and neighbors that pool money together for interest-free loans to circle members on a rotating slot basis. It’s a common concept in places like Latin America and India, where communities often come together to save together.

IDEO worked with Oraan for the couple of months leading up to the accelerator sprint, providing weekly office hours to support with improving their product. We then worked directly with Oraan for a dedicated four-week sprint, with a focus on understanding and improving the onboarding and application flow.

Product design & development expert

This project was a tactical, four-week effort with a tangible outcome for the client. At the end of it, Oraan's product leadership team was able to directly implement some of our designs, and had a clear action plan to investigate other areas.

My role on our small IDEO team was, first, to prepare our experiments for user research sessions. Once this research feedback was synthesized, I then lead the design of each screen based on the research insights. In addition, I also synced directly with the Head of Product & Engineering to align on the development approach and advise on their design system.

Creating trust & building empathy

In order to effectively solve the challenges Oraan was facing, we needed to ditch male defaults. Much of the application and onboarding flow alienated the women they were trying to serve. Very personal questions were phrased in such a way that defaulted to male archetypes, making many women feel self-conscious, embarrassed, or unworthy.

We approached this challenge with three guiding prompts:

1. HMW increase user input during the committee application flow by making it more trustworthy?
2. HMW encourage users to select lower risk committee slots that require fewer verification checks?
3. HMW design alternate verification models for people with limited to no documentation?

We worked at a moderately high fidelity level and very clearly communicated which aspects still needed to be fully designed. We were able to deliver 12 detailed product concepts for different steps throughout the application process.