How might we help people for informal borrowing & lending without any friction in relationships

Case study about a trust-based, friendly app that helps people track informal loans and send respectful reminders, reducing stress and protecting relationships.

11 min readSep 11, 2025

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🖍️ Problem

Informal borrowing and lending often gets chaotic. People often borrow or lend small amounts from friends, family, or colleagues but it’s usually messy for both borrowers and lenders because

People forget due dates.
Awkward reminders ruin relationships.
People miss details of who owes whom.

💡 Solution

Lendmate: The worry-free way to track loans, send friendly reminders, and keep friendships intact, because money shouldn’t cost you relationships.

Disclaimer: This is a personal project inspired by a real-world problem, developed based on insights from my friends and family circle, supported by real user surveys and testing.

Let’s jump into the case study in detail.

Problem Space

Quite a few times, I confronted with friends worrying about repayment of their lent money. Even though it is a small token of amount, most of them value the repayment as a social norm of trust factor among friends. And this often creates friction among relationships.

Having seen friends and family struggle with this, I wanted to see how good design can help.

Through this case study, I wanted to explore how design can make this sensitive process simple, transparent, and emotionally considerate. My goal is to understand real users’ challenges, test practical ideas, and create a user-friendly solution that balances trust, accountability, and human connection.

⭐️ Validating with Real Users

I gathered insights from 19 participants through a survey to uncover real pain points faced by both lenders and borrowers.

The survey revealed valuable qualitative insights to test desirability and identify specific frustrations of the users.

“Lent money to a friend. He forgot to return back. I am hesitating to ask him my money back. It’s been one years already”
“He borrowed from me and then ghosted”
“Lot of amount is there to get back, No hope”

From their stories, I am able to pinpoint key frictions in the borrowing and lending experience.

13 out of 16 people have borrowed or lent money with friends.
60% say they feel awkward or uncomfortable reminding others to return borrowed money.
Many people worry the other person will find it rude or awkward to be reminded, even for small amounts, especially when it’s borrowed from close friends.
70% have had a bad experience borrowing or lending money with friends.
12 out of 15 would prefer an app that helps manage borrowing and lending with friends and 8 of them would rather have this feature built into an app they already use.

Turns out, 60% of people would rather clean their inbox than ask for money back. Let’s fix that.

💡Affinity Mapping

Gathered user insights and clustered related notes to find patterns & identify themes. This gives an overview of different direction for the user issues and potential app features.

💡Synthesize Insights

I combined the findings into key insights and prioritized those that are repeated or show clear themes and patterns. These insights were then turned into actionable recommendations.

Show both lending and borrowing of a user to see real time status.
Overview of lent and borrowed money to keep track of debts and take actions without missing.
Provide a reminder option with dates, notes, and notifications, allowing lenders to send gentle nudges to borrowers before the due date.
Friendly reminders, with a custom reminder option, help reduce awkwardness and minimize friction in the relationship.
Users prefer an easy ‘Click and Pay Now’ option, not a process with lots of steps.
They want lending and borrowing as a simple add-on to their regular payment flow in their favourite app.

After doing this, I realised that synthesis is not just about identifying features — it’s about narrowing down the core issues, and delivering a better user experience.

Opportunity

I identified there’s an opportunity to help people lend and borrow money in a simple, respectful way, turning awkward reminders into trusted, shared record-keeping that keeps everyone on the same page. Existing solutions are too generic or overly formal.

Also in Indian diaspora, big players like GPay, PhonePe or Paytm handle payments but don’t offer a dedicated feature to manage casual lending/borrowing with built-in reminders, due dates, or trust signals. Therefore user rely on other apps which is not intended for lending.

Key User Problems

From the insights, I could wrote the problem statements in a user-focused way.

Problem Statement

I asked myself

How might we track informal lending and borrowing to see real time status without missing debts?
How might we provide friendly reminders remove awkwardness and remove friction to the relationship?
How might we ‘click and pay now’ easily without lots of steps provide a simple solution on the go?

These problem statements helped me identify clear opportunity areas where my design could have the most impact.

Personas: The Borrower & The Lender

I turned real frustrations into two relatable profiles: the Borrower and the Lender.

Solution Idea

“A trust-based, friendly app that helps people track informal loans and send respectful reminders — reducing stress and protecting relationships”

Initial Thoughts

These initial thoughts capture the raw ideas and first impression that came to my mind.

Overview of borrowed/lent amounts. See the lent and borrowed amount ledger
Repayment of the amount that I owe
Remind people who owe me
See the debt request I received and quick pay option
See the requests that I sent to others and check the status
Select people and send new money request
No friction when repaying
History of all settled transactions
Notification of requests and transactions
Profile with subsections for bank, profile and App settings
Ping friends with empathy
Friendly templates & emojis
Avatar will be good option
Due soon, overdue, paid
Pay needy or settle the dues fast timeline tracker
Partial payments
No timeline tracker for multiple payments

Key Features

Real-Time Ledger

Unified ledger split into “I Owe” and “Owed to Me”
Overview of borrowed and lent amounts
Track and settle dues quickly with a timeline view

Quick Borrow Options

Select people and send new money requests easily

Friendly Reminder System

Remind people who owe you before due dates
Send payment and message reminders
Ping friends with empathy

Easy Repayment

View money requests with a quick pay option
Pay directly from reminders or the ledger
Repay amounts you owe with fewer steps and clear confirmation
Real-time status updates

Notification

Receive alerts for requests and transactions
Track the status of money requests sent

Activities

Log of transactions, requests, and reminders sent and received
History of all settled transactions

Profile

Manage profile, bank details, and app settings
Option to set an avatar

The Random Start

I began exploring ideas by quick sketching different scenarios and screen flows. I also jotted down thoughts and scribbled rough concepts. Here’s how I got there.

This helped me think clearly and bring my ideas to life. Sketching a simple but powerful way to get thoughts out of your head and see them take shape.

🚢 The Titanic Moment

After extensive sketching, I defined the information architecture(IA) and built prototypes.

Core actions are easily accessible, with separate channels for lending and borrowing. The entire experience is action-oriented, designed to make conversations quicker, clearer, and more respectful.

Now, it’s time to make these ideas tangible by creating testable prototypes.

⭐️ Failure Points Worth Sharing

During the guerrilla usability test, I noticed several areas where users struggled;

Information overload: Key areas felt too dense. I realized progressive disclosure is needed to show essentials first, reveal details on demand.
Cluttered sections: Some parts, like dense lists or cards, felt overloaded, while others seemed incomplete.
Pre-written templates: Users didn’t find them helpful. A better approach could be letting users suggest their own messages either a simple ping or text.
Overview mechanism: Users wanted a summary of upcoming dues, so adding a small summary widget would help.
Home page layout: Needed more breathing space. The ‘I Owe’ and ‘Owe Me’ lists could be simplified into a simple ‘Borrow and Lend’.
UX copy: Could use a refresh, but still keep the emotional touch through emojis, avatars, and colors.

Refined Information Architecture

After 2–3 iterations, I arrived at two clear buckets: one for managing payments and another for communicating requests.

User Flow and Task Flow

User flows identified based on user research, goals pain points and user patterns. Following are two user flows; borrower flow and lender flow.

User Flow — Borrower

Key Tasks — Borrower

Borrow directly: Select payments, under borrow tab view recent interactions, and send a borrow request.
Initiate borrow via chat: Start a conversation, add amount and due date, send request, which appears in the message thread.
Check request status: Confirm whether the lender has seen or responded to the request via top widget or chat thread.
Repay borrowed money: Select payments, visit the borrowed list, settle one or multiple requests, receive confirmation, and see updates reflected in messages and ledger.
Respond to due notifications: Settle payments either from the home screen’s payment dues or the payment page.
Track borrows: Review all borrowed amounts in the ledger and transaction history.

User Flow — Lender

Key Tasks — Lender

Receive lend requests: View the request in messages, check the borrow card, and pay now.
Acknowledge repayment: When lent money is paid back, check the message thread and optionally send a “Thanks” message.
Request repayment: If money is due, use the payments/lend page to send a reminder or message the borrower using message thread.
Track payments: Review all lent amounts in the ledger and confirm received payments.

Payment Message Flow between Borrower and Lender

Borrow requests are sent as cards through the message thread, showing amount, due date, and relevant actions for each user. The card adapts dynamically: borrowers see ‘Remind’ once the borrower send request and lenders see ‘Pay Now’ until payment is completed. This ensures clarity and consistent interaction across both sides of the conversation.

Feature Refined

Based on the updated user flows and task, the existing features have been refined to better align with user needs. This makes it more simpler experience while maintaining all core functionality.

Integrated Ledger: The Borrow feature must be deeply integrated into the user’s main transaction history and balance.
Quick due notification and settler: The payment due list in the ledger for both borrow and lend should be notified and could take action immediately.
Borrow Chat Card: A special, interactive message type that displays amount, due date, status, and actionable buttons (Remind, Pay Now).
Status Persistence & Sync: The status of a borrow request and its repayment must be perfectly synced across the Ledger, the Chat, and Notifications.
Smart Notifications: Context-aware notifications that provide deep links to the exact borrow record for quick action (e.g., repaying from a notification). Message notification brings user to pay immediately.

Screens in Action: From Problem to Solution

Let’s look at the key pain points one by one. By focusing on each, I could design solutions that were not just functional, but actually meaningful for users.

From Sketch to Screen; The App in Action!

Watch the full concept video to explore Lendmate’s core features and thoughtful UX in action.

Dear readers, so far you have seen the tangible output of the design process. The intangible yet invaluable outcomes, however, are the lessons learned.

These points show the impact of my solutions and the principles I’ll use to guide future work.

📖 Key Learnings:

Lending/borrowing among friends is less about money, more about emotion. Design must reduce awkwardness & friction and keep trust and relationships.
Mistake: Jumped into Figma too early, leading to scattered changes and discarded screens. I learned, always sketch first to clarify ideas and finalize flows before moving to hi-fidelity design. Sketch>Validate > then Design Prototype.
How to improve emotional design with visual cues (e.g. badges, avatars, colours, UX Copy) to reinforce with trust, safety and relationship. Emotional design matters!
Early surveys and guerrilla testing shaped the design and helped avoid future blocks.

How We Measure Success

Even at this conceptual stage, we can define clear benchmarks to see if Lendmate would make borrowing and lending easier, faster, and more comfortable for users. These metrics help us understand what ‘success’ looks like and guide future iterations.

Engagement & Retention

Benchmark: Users should interact with core features ( borrow, settle, check dues) at least 3–5 times per week or record/settle ≥5 transactions per month (based on typical small-scale finance apps).

2. Time-on-task & Completion Rates

Benchmark: Key tasks ( sending borrow request or repaying money) should be completed in ≤30 seconds with a ≥90% success rate (industry standard for simple micro-tasks).

3. Error Rates

Benchmark: Less than 2% errors per task (errors include wrong amounts, duplicate entries, or missed steps).

4. Emotional Comfort

Benchmark: Users should rate tasks ≥ 4/5 on ease, comfort, and confidence (industry standard for low-friction UX.

Reflection & Future Directions

A massive thank you for taking the time to read this! The journey of designing for trust and ease continues, and I hope this case study gives you a glimpse of that process.😊 🙌