Candidly
Finance, Technology
Candidly is a fintech platform helping employees tackle student loan debt and build long-term financial wellness. Their tools connect borrowers with repayment strategies, employer benefits, and refinancing options to make navigating student loans simpler and less stressful. Candidly partners with employers and financial institutions to bring these benefits to the people who need them most.
The Challenge
As a fintech company building products around student loan repayment and financial wellness, Candidly needed fast, reliable user feedback to keep pace with their design sprint cycles. But sourcing the right participants was a persistent bottleneck. Finding people with relevant financial backgrounds and loan experience took time the team didn’t have. Without a streamlined way to recruit and test quickly, research became a slower, heavier lift that was difficult to integrate into an agile workflow.
That friction made it hard to get consistent input from people outside their immediate audience. The team risked making design decisions based on assumptions rather than real user perspectives, especially under the time pressure of a sprint. Running research at the cadence their process demanded felt out of reach without the right tooling in place.
The Outcome
Since adopting PlaybookUX, Candidly has transformed research from a slow, occasional effort into a fast and repeatable part of their design process. The ability to launch a user test quickly and tap into a broader pool of participants beyond their existing network means the team can get meaningful feedback at exactly the moment they need it. Design sprints now move forward with real user input rather than internal assumptions.
The impact extends beyond speed. With research woven more tightly into their workflow, Candidly is making better-informed design decisions and testing more frequently than before. What was once a bottleneck has become a competitive advantage, giving the team the confidence to iterate faster and build with greater clarity.
I am obsessed with how powerful and quick it is to launch a user test with PlaybookUX. It’s my go-to research tool when running design sprints or when my team is looking to hear from people outside our immediate audience.
Kurt Yalcin, UX Designer at Candidly