Turning a mortgage company's offline, manual financial tests into a modern online experience.
Duration:
2 Months
Industry:
Mortgage
Platforms:
Web
Areas:
Research, Product, UX, UI
Background
Underwriters were manually running financial tests on offline spreadsheets
Regulators were scrutinizing data quality issues from offline processes
Problem Statement
How might we bring these financial tests online and create a better experience for underwriters?
User Interviews & Analysis
During the research phase, I conducted interviews with four users, meticulously taking notes throughout each session. After gathering this qualitative data, I performed an affinity mapping exercise to identify and categorize user needs and pain points. This process provided valuable insights that informed the subsequent stages of the design process.
Personas & Journey Mapping
After conducting user interviews and analyzing the data, I created personas and a user journey. I identified several major pain points from the current process:
Manually inputting data was tedious.
Tests took a long time to run.
Results were scattered across multiple tabs, making them hard to interpret.
Users had to run tests multiple times to find optimized results.
Users were concerned about incorrect results due to manual input errors.
Ideating Solutions
I started off by hosting a whiteboarding session with UX, product, and technology stakeholders to come up with ideas together. The purpose was to get everyone aligned and on board with the direction of the designs.
My Design Process:
Design Ideation
I started off sketching out a series of low-fidelity designs, focusing on quantity to come up with different ideas.
Refinement
I then selected the parts from each one which I thought would best address the user's needs.
Medium-Fidelity
Finally, I converted my designs to medium-fidelity by leveraging the client's design system
Prototyping & Usability Testing
I then wrote a usability testing script to test some key assumptions and questions. Some of my questions included:
Are users able to quickly and easily provide all necessary test inputs?
Are users able to run the test successfully?
Are they able to quickly and accurately interpret test results?
I proceeded to conduct usability tests with four users.
Key Questions Answered
Users were able to quickly provide inputs to the tests.
Users were able to easily run the tests.
They were able to quickly and easily interpret test results.
Other Insights
Users wanted to be able to create many different drafts of the tests.
They mentioned how they'd like the test to be smart enough to recommend inputs to automatically optimize results for them.
Finalizing Mockups
Since the two additional insights discovered during user testing involved scope changes, I spoke with the product owner and technology leads about incorporating them into the designs.
They informed me that being able to create many test drafts would be too much development effort. It would remain out of scope for MVP but be added to the backlog as a future enhancement.
They were supportive of the idea of providing users with optimized input recommendations, and gave me the green light to include them in the designs.
*Designs have been modified to preserve client anonymity.
Outcomes
Handed designs over to dev team.
Supported dev team by answering questions, providing specs, and creating designs which covered edge cases.
Conduct design QA on code.
Lessons Learned & Next Steps
Engage product, technology, and business stakeholders early in the process when you discover new desires from users not in the original requirements.
Conduct more user testing and identify ways to further improve usability.
