UX / Product Design
U.S. Small Business Administration
Four questions.
The right loan.
A loan-finder quiz that replaces SBA's program-code dropdown with plain-language questions — routing any small business owner to the right program without them needing to know what a 7(a) is.
Role
UX Designer
Type
Speculative / Portfolio
Year
2026
Deliverable
Wireframe Board + UX Rationale
01 — The Brief
The problem is the question.
SBA's existing loan finder asks: “What type of loan do you want?” The options are program codes: 7(a), 504, Microloan, EIDL. Most applicants have never heard these terms. The result is abandoned flows, wrong applications, and loan officers fielding questions the website should have answered.
The brief: redesign the loan-discovery path so any small business owner — regardless of financial literacy — can identify the right program in under three minutes, on any device, without a phone call.
The constraint: stay within the USWDS (U.S. Web Design System) component library and SBA brand guidelines. Federal accessibility compliance (WCAG 2.1 AA) is non-negotiable. No custom components that SBA's engineering team would have to maintain.
02 — The Challenge
Users can't answer the wrong question.
01
Vocabulary gap
7(a), 504, EIDL — these are internal program codes, not user goals. Asking which one a borrower wants is like asking a patient which CPT billing code they need.
02
Dead-end branching
The existing flow shows all programs regardless of eligibility. Users who don't qualify for certain programs still spend time reading them — and don't know they're wasting it.
03
Trust cliff before results
The current form asks for SSN and credit pull before showing any options. Most users abandon at this point. The quiz defers identity until after the match.
The solution reframes every question around what the user already knows: what the money is for, where their business is today, how much they need, and when. SBA program codes only appear after the match — as a label, not a question.
03 — Approach
Map programs to goals,
not goals to programs.
Four questions, progressive disclosure
Q1 asks what the money is for — six plain-language purposes that map exhaustively to all SBA programs. Q2 establishes business stage and revenue, silently filtering programs the user wouldn't qualify for. Q3 sets loan amount using SBA's actual breakpoint values as tick marks (so users can see where the program caps sit). Q4 is optional: special eligibility that unlocks additional programs — Veterans Advantage, Community Advantage, 8(a).
No dead ends, no opaque elimination
Each answer narrows the candidate set silently. Users never see a “you don't qualify” message mid-flow. At results, the best match appears with full rationale — and two runner-ups explain why they weren't primary. Variant B (recommended in the wireframes) leads with the next step rather than just the program name, because the actual question after “which loan?” is always “what do I do now?”
Three user personas as stress tests
The wireframe board includes three composite personas — a veteran opening a second location, a first-generation immigrant launching a food business, and a disaster-affected shop owner. Each persona walks the quiz flow and surfaces where standard SBA messaging fails specific user needs, grounding design decisions in real use cases rather than hypothetical averages.
04 — Wireframe Board
The complete design board
12 frames across 4 phases: hero variants, quiz screens, results, and persona walkthroughs. Built to SBA brand standards using the SBA brand guide and U.S. Web Design System component library.
05 — What This Demonstrates
UX thinking applied
to a real policy problem.
Information architecture
Restructuring a complex eligibility matrix into a linear, question-by-question flow without losing any decision signal.
Progressive disclosure
Deferring complexity (program codes, eligibility details, credit requirements) until the user has enough context to process it.
Trust-aware design
Privacy copy, no-credit-pull positioning, and transparent data use are treated as design decisions — not legal afterthoughts.
Constraint-led design
Every component is USWDS-native. The design works within an existing federal system rather than proposing a greenfield rebuild.