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Sgltn.UX

Loan Application Processing Platform

Space: Mortgage FinTech | Via: Xpanse

EXECUTION

Product Design • UX • Visual Design • Research • SaaS

ROLE

Principal Product Designer

Engagement

Full-time Design IC

Role

Project Role & Leadership​

I took over design ownership of a product and led a build from PRD to POC prototype in my first 8 weeks.

In my role as Principal Product Designer, I was brought on to lead design efforts for Xpanse’s second product pillar — a portal to serve the needs of the Loan Officers’ workflow. Though this product fit in our B2C suite (ultimately serving the needs of borrowers) our target buyer was lender organizations. It was one of the many nuances I uncovered over the course of this project.

My directive was to define the initial roadmap with product management and engineering, guide all aspects of the product design team’s involvement, staff the effort with the right amount of UX support, synthesize any available user research, align the team’s goals with key stakeholders, integrate the UX team efforts with those of cross-functional partners, and ensure the product was designed to meet our strategic goals.

Objective

Problem & Objectives

Mortgage sales teams spend a lot of time collecting, requesting, clarifying and updating borrower information, across disjointed systems. Loan Officers need to be able to quickly respond to update and complete loan applications to quickly convert leads to loans. Loan Officers and their managers need more holistic solutions to allow them to manage, and service sales leads efficiently and keep everyone in the process, including the borrower, updated.

Objectives

  1. A streamlined streamlined system for Loan Officers to track, manage, and service leads. LAs are often on a quota or have their performance measured by “locking” an app.
  2. An organized, unified UI for Loan Officers that facilitates an efficient workflow for closing leads
  3. Improvement in Lead-to-App Conversion Rate
  4. Lower time to close a loan, across stages
Strategy

Product Strategy

To address these needs, Xpanse’s Spark LO Portal was defined as a loan application processing platform that allows loan officers and sales managers to manage key workflows in one workspace. The platform would enable them to quickly and efficiently process mortgage loan applications, and working cohesively through selective automation and configurable workflows, powered by seamless integrations with other lender tools like CRM, PPE (product pricing engine), and LOS.

Product flow map

Some of the existing screens within the tool Loan Officers are currently using. I stiched together an approximation of thier current workflow and some of the key screens we would focus on re-designing. 

RESEARCH

User Research

At the beginning of the project, we had our user researcher organize a series of user interviews conducted over Zoom to shadow Loan Officers as they worked through their daily routine. The initial user group we decided to focus on was for call center sales, so this made it easy for us to listen in as they worked calls and ask questions without interfering.

We also had several discovery calls with management stakeholders and SMEs to uncover any additional info.

The Director of Product Management and I went through all of the various information her, myself, and the team collected up front to help narrow our focus, and pulled out all of the major themes that would guide our work.


Depending on the needs of the project, some of the criteria we use to decide how we go about collecting and validating feedback would include:

  1. When possible, get input from the users (surveys)
  2. Understand their pain points (interviews)
  3. What are your user’s expectations of how the product should address their needs
    (Jobs to Be Done)
  4. Are the features and functionality of the product suited to the capabilities of the target audience (call reviews)
Wireframing

Design Planning

We defined our major feature list so that we could start building a roadmap and then I got to work thinking about what we need to do with the UI to help address the pain points of our users.

I opted to start with some low-fidelity design to work as our wireframe to really help our stakeholders grasp how the pieces of the solution needed to fit and flow together.

Lead Pipeline Wireframe

Lead Overview Wireframe

Lead Details Wireframe

Visual Design

Feature Level Design

I identified 4 key features to anchor the UX soultion

Notepad
The nature of calls with borrowers was to create a conversational interaction. This often resulted in borrowers jumping around in terms of the information they were ready provide. They didn’t always follow the sequence of the form screens, requiring the loan officer to jot down notes for information they weren’t ready to input. So the first major improvement we planned was to integrate a notepad feature that could be accessed on any lead form screen. These notes would also feed into a lead history.

Lead History
The Lead History provided a record of all information shared or collected, and allowed any communications or documentation collected to live with the lead so that is could be accessed by anyone involved with the lead at any time.

Lead Navigation
Loan Officers often mentioned the limitations of having to fill in forms in a linear order. In the current system our Loan Officers were using, they were locked into completing long application forms in a sequential screen flow. This didn’t allow for free-flowing conversation with a borrower. The updated Lead Nav gives Loan Officers visibility of all sections and allows them to move through form sections as needed.

Progress Tracking
They also didn’t have visibility of the sections they had already completed or still needed to complete.

We designed the Lead Navigation to allow easy and clear access to any section of the form at any time. Included in each section’s nav card were a progress bar to indicate the measure of completion, a TRID counter to show the status of 6 areas of information that needed to be completed to meet certain compliance requirements, and a check box to mark non-TRID items as complete manually.

We shared our progress with some of our client side stakeholders. The sentiments at each stage was that we nailed the solutions for their main pain points.

We shared our progress with some of our client side stakeholders and the response shared at each stage, from wireframe to functional prototype, to hi-fidelity design was increasingly a sentiment that we really nailed the solutions for their main identified pain points.

– Director of Product Management

Results

Planned POC Release

We weren’t able to complete and release the product due to the company eliminating 75% of the staff. We were well on our way to the full build out we envisioned for Q4 of 2022. We started the project mid-Oct 2021 and had a functional POC, injected with data, in code and ready to demo by April 2022.

Our plan was built around goal metrics that certainly would have been acheivable had we continued development.

  1. Ramping from 50% of leads coming in to 100% of traffic end of Q2
  2. Current monthly ~1200+ (23 days)
  3. Daily about ~180 leads
  4. Assign about 10 leads per LO
  5. Minimum 10 LO users

Lead Pipeline

Lead Overview

Lead Details Form

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