Redesigning Tata Capital's website.

Tata Capital came to us with three compounding problems. The website was underperforming on lead generation. Product discovery was broken — users landing on the site had no clear way to find the full range of offerings beyond loans. And younger fintech competitors were acquiring customers through modern, mobile-friendly experiences that made Tata Capital's digital presence look dated by comparison.

The business stakes were clear: Tata Capital wasn't just another financial services provider — it was one of India's most trusted brand names. But trust built over decades was being quietly eroded by a website that hadn't kept pace with how people now discover and apply for financial products.

Tata Capital's product range meant the website needed to work for fundamentally different intents simultaneously. I anchored design decisions around three user types — with Rohan as the primary lens.

What united all three was a single unmet need: the ability to discover, understand, and act on a Tata Capital product entirely from a mobile screen — without friction, without confusion, and without having to trust a brand they couldn't see was still invested in its own digital experience.

My north star for this project was a simple question applied to every decision: how easy is it to find a Tata Capital product? Discovery was the root problem. If we solved discovery, lead generation and trust would follow.

The harder strategic challenge was cultural. The client's instinct — understandably — was to benchmark against competitors. Every design decision needed to be validated by pointing to someone else who had done it. I pushed back on this directly.

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We are supposed to be market leaders. We should be building experiences that inspire competitors to copy us — not the other way around.

To make this argument land, I presented design options in pairs: the safe, competitor-validated direction alongside the bolder alternative, with explicit reasoning for each. This gave the client a genuine choice rather than a design decree — and consistently, the evidence behind the bolder option was compelling enough to move them forward.

I also set a lens that every designer on the team used to pressure-test suggestions: this website belongs to a legacy brand. It can feel modern and fintech-forward, but every decision must still speak from a position of trust. Modern doesn't mean disposable. Accessible doesn't mean simple-minded.

With 90% of users on mobile, we designed mobile-first — but not mobile-only. Desktop wireframes served a specific strategic purpose: they let us lay out the maximum number of elements a page could contain, understand the full information hierarchy, and make explicit decisions about what was essential vs. decorative.

The navigation redesign was the most structurally important decision. With loans, investments, insurance, and wealth products all competing for attention, I grouped the product suite into clear intent-based headers — users coming with a loan intent, an investment intent, or a business need could each find their path immediately without scanning the full menu.

The SEO content challenge required a different kind of creativity. The text slabs couldn't be removed — they were critical for Google rankings across product pages. So rather than fighting the constraint, we designed around it: adding icons, comparison tables, indentation, and structured formatting that transformed dense text into something genuinely readable on a small screen. Same words. Completely different experience.

The homepage anchored the visual direction. Glassmorphism — a design language more associated with consumer apps than legacy financial institutions — was a deliberate bet. Applied with restraint, it gave the site a fresh, modern feel while the underlying architecture, information hierarchy, and Tata brand language kept it grounded in trust. Users could check loan eligibility, explore products, and use calculators without ever leaving the homepage.

Post-launch, the website held its own alongside the new generation of Indian fintech products — modern in feel, but distinctly Tata in its authority and depth. Lead generation improved. Page load speeds increased. The mobile experience finally matched the scale of the brand it represented.

The clearest signal of success: The digital team was excited to showcase the new design publicly — and early user response validated the direction. The site felt like Tata Capital had made a statement, not just an update.

For Rohan — and every user like him — the difference was tangible. He could now land on the site from a Google search, check his vehicle loan eligibility, understand the benefits, compare rates, and begin an application entirely from his phone on the couch. The branch visit he wanted to avoid was no longer necessary. The experience finally matched the trust the brand had already earned.

This project reinforced something I now apply to every enterprise redesign: the design team's job isn't just to make the right thing — it's to make the client confident enough to choose the right thing. The two-option presentation format I developed here, showing the safe path alongside the better one, became a core part of how I present to legacy clients.

If I ran this project again, I'd push harder for direct user testing earlier in the process — particularly with the mobile navigation. Analytics told us where users dropped off, but conversations with Rohan-type users would have surfaced the why much faster, and given us stronger evidence to move the client further from their instinct to play it safe.