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Internal product design of a robust and intuitive lending experience that allows Loan Officers to streamline their daily tasks to swiftly get clients to homeownership.
ROLE
As Lead UX/Ul Designer, I worked tightly alongside the product and engineering team to bring this product from ideation to launch. I contributed to user research, completed a company rebrand redesign, designed and prototyped over 500 mocks, facilitated and distributed tasks among my team, and much more!
TIMELINE
Nov 2022 -
Current
TOOLS
Figma
Adobe XD
OUTDATED, COMPLEX, AND UNTRUSTWORTHY SYSTEMS
Everyday loan officers have to handle large amounts of high-security information, this becomes extremely difficult when the systems being used cannot be trusted by the user. Below is the main system our users were using in order to close a loan; Pipeline, Client Profile, and 1003 Application.
What loan officers saw when looking at all their clients.
How the profile of a client was structured and presented
Very dense UI for the 1003 application, lacks hierarchy and understandable navigation
What loan officers saw when looking at all their clients.
A STREAMLINED SYSTEM THAT MAKES THE LENDING JOURNEY ENJOYABLE AND RELIABLE
We enhanced the entire experience for our loan officers, revamping to a modern design that emphasized trust and security was only the beginning solution for this product. With focus on the 3 main features that were required to get a client a closed loan (Pipeline, Client Profile, and 1003 Application), we organized an easily ingestible and fluid user flow that required deconstructing more than 30 micro-task focused flows.
OUR GOALS
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Design a clean and intuitive user experience and interface
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Meet, and refine, user task workflows
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Decrease external 3rd party service providers
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Provide a universal framework to be by adopted by other companies in the industry
PIPELINE
A central area for loan officers to view and get information on all their past, present, and incoming clients at every part of their loan journey (lead, in progress, funded, archive). The pipeline feature also enables application creation, quick access to contact information, and bulk actions.
CLIENT PROFILE
Not only will officers use this to view their basic client information, but we designed it to be integral to streamlining the loan application process by providing a gateway to access all of the clients loans (1003 Applications). Loan Officers can also utilize this space to create notes for their client, so they can build stronger and personal relationships.
1003 APPLICATION
Designed with a requirement of fluidity and functionality, the 1003 is categorized into different sections of the very long and dense 1003 Application.This allows loan officers to stick to the path, or to chose their own in order to complete the 1003 with ease. We also integrated key services like running credit, generate a pre-approval, adding documents, and much more to reduce using external providers.
UNDERSTANDING OUR USERS AND THEIR UNIQUE WORKFLOWS
We had a foundation of understanding of our users, but to ensure that our user groups were accurate to the test of time alongside the ever-changing loan and mortgage market- we began with semi structured user interviews. Our goal was to gain qualitative insights to our target groups in order to produce user personas and detailed task workflows of the current system used. The time spent with our users exposed the many tasks that were inconvenient, unenjoyable, or simply difficult to complete and other areas where users enjoyed the steps for a specific task.
SELECTED RESEARCH STRATEGIES
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User Interviews
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Task Focused Workflows with Product
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Streamlined User Flow
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Information Architecture
A GLIMPSE OF OUR USERS
We categorized our users into 2 groups based on employment type and daily work habits- these groups are ILA (Internal Loan Originators) and OLA (Outside Loan Originators). Creating personas added further clarity to the divergences between each group, which would become useful reference points as functions developed.
TASK FOCUSED WORKFLOWS
We worked with the product team while interviewing our users to create the task focused workflows, detailing all necessary actions and steps a user must undertake throughout the loan process with their current system
AN IMPROVED AND STREAMLINED USER FLOW
After reviewing the task workflows with Product and Business and understanding the priority of each task to the loan process, UX and Product saw great potential in streamlining all these tasks into one guided and intuitive user flow. Below is the user flow the UX team provided, after numerous iterations to ensure each task and microtask could be accomplished efficiently.
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
The user flow enabled us to move forward and create an information architecture that accurately showed Product and Business how data would be structured within the system in order to help the user succeed. Given the complexity and depth of the loan process, we prioritized maintaining users mental models from the current system they were using, so that we weren’t completely throwing the users into left field. So, in order to advance the onboarding of this product we grouped and organized information, tasks, and microtasks that users were already used to associating together. This further supported our streamlined user flow that would increase productivity. Though users were given a new flow with a modernized UI, the familiarity in behaviors to their current work flow promotes ease of success.
WIREFRAMES
Creating Low-fidelity wireframes allowed us to visualize the solution features and their respective task flows that the high fidelity prototype would focus on: 1. Pipeline, 2. Prospect Profile, and 3. 1003 Application.
Additional features, such as notes, were also wireframed.
While reviewing these wireframes with our target users and product team, we got positive feedback on the structure of the product. Product team reaffirmed that all MVP requirements were met, and our users expressed excitement of the organization and streamlined loan process.
FINAL DESIGNS
With much excitement, the team integrated all the color, typography, and branding of the product into the designs to create the final prototype. The result is a sleek, secure, and modern interface that reflects brand personality, communicating professionalism and reliability.
THOUGHTS AND REFLECTIONS
TIMELINE CHANGES
Due to a sudden change of timeline from business that required pushing MVP to a much earlier date, the team was unable to conduct usability testing of the lo-fidelity wireframes and had to move forward with hi-fidelity in a short time period. This caused concern, however to ensure we were receiving useful user feedback the team decided to launch Pilot which would allow us to test and monitor the usability of the application and also gain critical user feedback that could be solutionized for MVP.
ORGANIZATION
One of the most critical events during this project was a complete change of brand guide and identity. Thankfully, my team ensured we had an organized and cohesive design system so that changing colors and fonts to our library on Figma was easy peasy.
WHAT'S NEXT?
The product development lifecycle is never-ending; we can always iterate and improve a product based on users feedback and research- and especially in the loan and mortgage industry we will continuously be aware of the market as well as competitors.