First, some housekeeping
Created in 1983, the Credit Review System application was created for underwriters to review loan applications for the everyday customer. Fast forward 40 years, and its lack of modern workflows and input limitations cause redundancy, inefficiency, and day-to-day frustrations for anyone who uses it. With a dedicated UX team, there was finally enough bandwidth to create an entirely new application from the ground up – with updated workflows, visuals, and capabilities to make it easy-to-learn and expert-friendly.
User Interviews + Application Analysis
Our first stop in tackling this project was understanding the problem. By interviewing associate, senior, and managerial-level underwriters, we got information across the board on what each level found necessary, tedious, and noteworthy.
Our first stop in tackling this project was understanding the problem. By interviewing associate, senior, and managerial-level underwriters, we got information across the board on what each level found necessary, tedious, and noteworthy.
Personal Development
Starting this project in November meant we couldn't connect with business partners as much as we would've liked as a team. As this product team was inexperienced in working with designers, it was important to establish trust in our expertise and value to make this partnership successful. I sought out opportunities to participate in cross-functional workshops to learn skills geared towards the business side of product design. These conversations also helped build buy-in from non-designer team members by creating ways to "meet them where they are" and show the value designers bring to product teams.
While not specifically tied to the final product, I wanted to highlight a significant part of my professional growth during this project.
Cross-collaboration + Shared Vision
With business partners now on board, it was time to come together to establish key business goals. This was the best time to instill human-centered design practices by considering the user and teaching non-design team members the importance of using user research in business decisions.
We came together to create problem/HMW statements, and journey maps:
When creating HMW statements, I felt there was a way to communicate value better and increase buy-in from the development team. For non-designers, HMWs are rarely used, and their value isn't understood. Instead, I added reasoning and outcome explanations for each statement, making it easier to understand why certain decisions were made over others. With this method, I noticed that non-designers were more trusting when it came to designs, and it was referenced back whenever the team hit a roadblock.
As this system is meant to be both beginner and expert-friendly, we created two journey maps to reflect the experience between associate and senior underwriters. Many of our users have used the existing application for decades, and while all were excited about the transition to a more robust product, reducing as much friction and minimizing the learning curve was essential to us in making a successful product.
Ideation + Testing
With the freedom of creating an entirely new application, our team worked fast and loose during the sketching phase to get ideas on paper.
Ultimately, we came up with three directions to explore; the main improvement we chose to focus on was navigation. As navigation was a notable pain point for everyone we talked to, addressing this aspect of the old application would have the most significant impact. It also gave us the perfect canvas to devise ways to make this application teachable and expert-friendly by creating workflows that were flexible enough for someone to breeze through but also intuitive and structured for those unfamiliar to the system.
After testing and hearing feedback on all three prototypes, our analysis revealed the idea of a hybrid between the tab system and conventional scroll (images 1 & 2). Creating a hybrid model was the best way to decrease the time to decision per application while improving the consistency and efficiency of our underwriters. We continued to iterate and refine this hybrid model, testing along the way to keep users at the top of our minds.
Challenges
As we were getting ready to test the first iteration of our new hybrid model, the engineering/development team released their new UI kit, Unified Framework. Wells Fargo was committed to creating a better experience for its employees and customers, so this design system was created as a reference for its component library, style guides for different products, guidelines, and other resources.
While a little frustrating, this gave our team the perfect opportunity to connect with the engineering team to establish regular check-ins between development and design. I hope situations like this can be avoided with open communication between the two teams, as we're both working towards the same goal of creating a great product.
Testing + Final Designs
Once we thought our design was in a place to hand off to development, we had one more testing session. As testing our solution against the legacy application wouldn't be fair, we tested it against our first iteration. We tested error rate, task completion time, satisfaction rating, and overall feedback.
Reflection
This was my first major project as a designer for Wells Fargo. Before this project started, I was helping on an incubation project and creating mockups for a different LOB that had lost their designer months prior.
Like starting anything new, I was pretty nervous, especially knowing that this project would affect thousands of employees and customers. Sometimes, I would be overwhelmed because we were starting from scratch and weren't using the "bones" from the previous product to work from. But that proves how a good team can make or break a designer; having other associate designers to brainstorm with and knowing our senior was there to help guide us if needed was a huge help.
I stepped out of my comfort zone during this project by either going with the flow when my "ideal" process wasn't going the way I planned or creating new processes to use when working with cross-functional team members. I still have a lot to grow, but I can appreciate looking back to the designer I was before and seeing how much I've improved in a short period of time.