Redesign a Microfinance App for Four Cross-Cultural Markets
Overview
What this challenge is about.
Redesign four cross-cultural flows for a microfinance app using field data. Justify each change with evidence. Earn a verifiable certificate.
The scenario
Saakshi Capital is a 140-person microfinance lender headquartered in Bangalore that issues mobile-first working-capital loans to small-business owners across India, Kenya, Indonesia, and the Philippines, where a single English-only app drives strong adoption at home but stalls badly abroad.
The Brief
What you'll do, and what you'll demonstrate.
The five core app flows must be redesigned to be culturally adaptive so that seven-day retention in Kenya, Indonesia, and the Philippines rises from 14 percent toward 30 percent without degrading the India experience.
Earning criteria — what you'll demonstrate
- Translate pre-collected cross-cultural research into concrete, defensible interaction-design decisions
- Distinguish genuine cultural adaptation (trust, convention, register) from surface-level translation
- Read a retention funnel to locate where and why each market drops off, and design against those specific points
- Synthesize qualitative field signal into patterns and outliers without overgeneralizing across markets
- Package design reasoning into a reusable playbook that scales to future markets
Program Fit
Where this fits in your program.
Sharpens the same skills your degree expects you to demonstrate.
Aligned coursework coming soon.
Skills
Skills you'll demonstrate.
Each one shows up on your verified credential.
- Cross Cultural Design
Apply cross cultural design to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- User Research
Conduct interviews, surveys, and usability tests to uncover actionable user insights.
- Contextual Inquiry
Apply contextual inquiry to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Hci Research Methods
Apply hci research methods to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Interaction Design
Apply interaction design to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Localization
Apply localization to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
Careers
Career paths this challenge builds toward
Completing this challenge demonstrates skills that transfer directly to these roles:
Product Manager, International / Localization
This challenge mirrors how international PMs turn market research into a fundable redesign proposal, defending each decision with evidence and packaging it so engineering and design can ship adaptive experiences across very different markets.
This challenge sharpens
- cross-cultural-design
- localization
- user-research
UX Researcher, Emerging Markets
You practice converting interpreter-mediated field readouts and expert reviews into a clear synthesis of patterns and outliers, the core craft of a researcher who must make qualitative cross-cultural signal actionable for product teams.
This challenge sharpens
- user-research
- contextual-inquiry
- hci-research-methods
Interaction Designer, Global Products
Designing culturally adaptive components and flows from evidence, rather than re-skinning a single UI, is exactly what global interaction designers do when one product must feel native in several markets at once.
This challenge sharpens
- interaction-design
- cross-cultural-design
- localization