By Arvind Sridharan, Rang De Team
In the last three years of our evolution as an organisation, we have had to focus on different aspects that are critical to strengthening our foundation. In the first year, our focus was on getting a hold on field operations — the field partners, the borrower screening and evaluations. At that point, technology was outsourced to partners. We have gradually ramped up our operations in the field and in the last 6 months have managed to build a technology team. The way we see it — both operations and technology will play a critical role in our scaling up.
As a technology team member, I see the way forward as being able to develop features and tools that will engage our social investors and provide a great user experience for first time users.
The Rang De technology team has been working on making some existing features lighter and faster and also to make the User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) more sleek for first time users. To start with, we have redone our Search Borrower and Borrower Profile Pages. Some of the key UI changes we have made to the Search Borrowers page are :
- The states in which we have borrowers in need of social investments are clearly displayed. We also show all the states where we have facilitated loans to before.
- Users can show borrowers who are in need of investments based on the amount left to be raised.
- Users can see borrowers in different loan statuses
- The total need of borrowers matching the search criteria has also been displayed
Since we got a great response for our “Search Borrowers” and “Borrower Profile” pages, we decided to replicate the same UI in our “Evaluations Page”. We then went on to release a couple of microsites for the IPL and the Bangalore Marathon 2011 which we can always reuse for any cricket series or marathon.
Currently we are working on making our social investment process lighter and faster. We will also be launching a new landing page for our dashboard and change the UI and voucher designs for our gift vouchers. We’ll keep you posted on our new releases!
Meanwhile we are welcome to suggestions on our website — especially small changes you think would make a huge difference for existing as well as new users on RangDe.Org.
You are also welcome to intern with us or volunteer for our Technology Volunteer Group. For both internship and volunteering opportunities, please write to us at work@rangde.org and we will help you get started.
