Kiva Partners with Design Bootcamp to Improve Lender Experience

At Kiva we believe creating a great user experience is essential to accomplishing our mission of connecting people through lending to alleviate poverty. The Kiva website acts as a bridge between lenders and borrowers, allowing them to feel a sense of connection with one another. Not only does a person’s experience with the Kiva website impact their lending activity, but it can also affect their motivation to contribute time and money to social good in other areas of their lives.

To that end, I’m excited to share that Kiva will be participating in a UX Boot Camp with Cooper, a design strategy firm based in San Francisco on March 11-14. Cooper’s Boot Camps are intensive four-day training classes for designers, developers and product managers who want to take their skills to the next level and contribute a bit of time working on social good.

It’s an incredible opportunity for Kiva to gather a group of talented technology specialists and get their perspective on the challenges and opportunities we face as an organization.

In particular, this UX Boot Camp will focus on how lenders decide which loans they want to support, and how Kiva can better facilitate that selection process. One of the primary hurdles that our user research has uncovered over the past year is the trepidation many lenders feel when faced with the process of selecting a borrower. Long term or short term loan? How much to lend? Which country? What risks do I need to consider? What impact will I make? These are just a few of the questions we’ve seen lenders struggle to answer before selecting a loan.

With the help of the UX Boot Camp we hope to generate ideas and design tools to help Kiva lenders answer these questions and feel confident in their choices. Lenders often tell us the Kiva website acts as their window into the world – a place to see and meet people from different countries and cultures -- and we hope the ideas generated at this session will help open that window even wider.

If you’re interested in getting involved you can find more information on Cooper’s website.