Dates
Jan 2022 - Mar 2022
Title
UX/UI Designer
Team
3 Designers
It comes as no surprise that, behind the scenes, there are many moving parts in the mortgage industry. And from the increase of applications in the last few years, it is no exaggeration that underwriters are drowning in deadlines and documents, relying on outdated systems and manual workarounds to manage their workload.
Elphi is a technology company streamlining the loan origination process to help mortgage lenders focus on what matters most.
Elphi aims for its product to ensure compliance, automating repetitive tasks using smart checklists and configurable business workflows that work best for users. Their initial focus is improving the experience for underwriters who prepare loan documents and submit completed profiles to banks or mortgage lenders for approval.
Our team was asked to redesign the portal dashboard and loan task pages. Due to limited time, we broke into groups of 2 to tackle this task: I was responsible for the project's dashboard and final UI design.
As the mortgage industry was new to most of us on the team, our first stop at tackling this project was talking to underwriters. 10 underwriters were interviewed and revealed the following information about underwriter behaviors, motivations, and pain points:
Underwriters spent between 30 – 60 minutes planning their day.
Used programs like Tableau, Outlook, and Excel to track loan information and progress.
Using the FIFO (first in, first out) method caused redundant tasks.
The biggest pain points were attributed to clunky information architecture organization (or lack thereof). These interviews provided a baseline of initial problems and insights to tackle
Building a profile requires piecing together information from various sources, and most analysts have 20+ loans at a time.
Analyst productivity is measured by completed tasks and loans per month.
Key Loan Tasks are used as high-level 'checkpoints' to track the progression of a loan.
Spend 30 minutes to an hour planning their day using emails and calendar reminders.
How can we help Underwriters save time throughout their day?
How might we visually communicate the progress of a loan?
How could we help Underwriters feel confident in structuring their day?
During ideation, we came up with plenty of ideas. But before moving on to wireframing, we wanted to ground ourselves in the most impactful features. Each feature was evaluated and categorized using the MoSCoW method:
Elphi is a modern start-up, and they want a product to match. We took the time to redesign both pages to fit Elphi's branding better and align with business goals.
Before iterating on our designs, I researched the fundamentals of dashboard design. We'd done a great job understanding the underwriter's frustrations, but we neglected what makes a great dashboard—content and metrics.
Content -> Sections -> Metrics
Reporting/Monitoring Data
Colors
Taking what I learned from these resources and further questioning our underwriters, we came up with a second version for both the dashboard and applicant profile pages that were better received overall:
I took ownership of the final high-fidelity design for both the dashboard and loan task pages.
One request from our underwriters was the ability to view multiple loans at once. This led to the idea of an expandable card to view high-level loan information from the dashboard.
This card is meant to act as a condensed version of the loan task page. It communicates KCT status and overall loan progression quickly.
Below is a video of our prototype, both dashboard and the lovely loan detail pages the other half of our group designed.