A form nobody filled, turned into a shop.
Khatabook wanted to enable loans, and loans needed KYU: Know Your User. The form converted at under 2%. So we made the form disappear: merchants built their own shop on screen, answer by answer, and inaugurated it. 17,000 merchants completed it in two weeks.
Khatabook wanted to enable loans for its merchants, and to underwrite a loan you have to know the user. KYU asked the essentials: where the business is located, what kind of business it is, whether it is GST registered, how many staff it employs. Standard, boring, necessary.
As a plain form, it converted at under 2%. The research told us why: low digital literacy, cognitive overload, and a trust deficit. In the field interviews merchants said it plainly: "It asks too many things at once. I get confused." And: "Why do you need all this data? Will it be safe?" The brief said improve completion. The question I asked first was: why would a merchant care?
The obvious play was gamification: points, badges, progress bars. We rejected it. Gamification treats users like they need to be tricked into finishing, and that is manipulation wearing design’s clothes.
The real insight was simpler. Small business owners in India are proud of their shops. The shop is the identity. So we made the product reflect that: as a merchant answered, their shop visibly took shape on screen, and when the last answer landed, they cut the ribbon and inaugurated it. Grounded in four behavioural principles: reward anticipation, cognitive ease, completion bias, and micro-feedback, and carried by the craft the research demanded: progressive disclosure instead of a wall of fields, plain language instead of legal jargon, and error recovery that never restarts the journey.
The build is personal. The kind of business a merchant runs decides the shop that rises on their screen: a retailer's storefront, a wholesaler's depot, a manufacturer's unit, a distributor's warehouse. The GST answer dresses the shop with its registration, and completing KYU earns the inauguration: ribbon, garlands, celebration.
A small pod: design, product, analytics, and motion. The empathy came first, from field visits to real shops, interviews about how merchants see digital finance, and observation on the old devices and weak connections they actually use. Every choice after that was a hypothesis with a metric attached, instrumented before it shipped, then A/B tested and validated in Hindi, Kannada, and other local languages.
The leadership work was mostly restraint: holding the line against stakeholder pressure to add points and badges, and making the case that respect converts better than tricks. The results settled the argument.
The form that converted under 2% ended at 78% engagement, and 17,000 merchants completed KYU in the first two weeks. Abandonment fell, completion got faster, and support costs came down with it. It became the most successful project I worked on at Khatabook, and it unlocked the data the lending business was built on.
The unmeasurable outcome was the more important one: merchants saw themselves in the product. A bookkeeping utility earned an emotional connection, which is the hardest currency in consumer fintech.
Gamification asks: how do we get users to do what we want? Good design asks: how do we make doing the right thing feel good? I have applied that distinction to every product since, at every scale.
I wrote up the KYU engagement work in more detail here: How we improved KYU engagement to 78% at Khatabook.