The Goal
The goal of the project was to simplify the process of the traditional home loan for both the buyer, known as the customer, and the processing staff, known as the factory. By making tools that were simpler and more closely tied together, the customer would always know where they were in the process and the factory would have an easier time understanding which department, from the loan officer all the way to the final underwriter, was currently processing the loan.
The first iteration of the pizza tracker, designed prior to me joining the company.
The Challenge
In a traditional “pizza tracker” style UI feedback, the process goes from left to right in a constant motion until the point of delivery. After several rounds of discovery work with people throughout the loan life cycle, I learned that a mortgage process is not linear like this. The mortgage will often move backwards, if new information becomes available. Also, the loan process may stall or get hung up on one of the steps, when additional information is needed by the factory in order to continue to move the process forward.
An Additional Challenge
When I presented my findings to the CEO, that the pizza tracker was likely not the best solution for the process, I was informed that the pizza tracker was in integral part of the solution as the process had been sold to our investors as the differentiator from our competitors. This created a design challenge, as I needed to stay within the framework of a tracking system, while making it make sense for both the customer and the factory.
The customer facing side of the new tracking service
A wireframe of the factory facing side of the new tracking service
The Solution
What I proposed was that instead of one, long tracker going from left to right, we instead show tracking information based on completeness of the 4 main steps of the loan process. This includes the application, the verification, the approval, and the closing processes. For each phase of the loan, the tracking information would fill based on where the loan was in the process, with the ability for the tracking information to shrink back down should one of the parts of the process need more information.
Utilizing this concept for the factory side gave us more opportunity for us to allow people within each part of the process to pick up the loan for their work, tag it with its phase of the process, and give the user more options to explain any exceptions or request any further information from the borrower.
Presentation
I presented this new concept to our investors during an all-hands meeting and they were pleased with the direction, handing a new round of funding to the company to continue their efforts. This concluded my portion of the contract and I moved on to another project with a major health care provider but I was happy with where I left things with this concept.
