To kick off the project, senior stakeholders (Chief Commercial Officer, Head of Underwriting, Lead Salesforce Developer) had a discussion with myself and the project manager. This was a great opportunity to ask as many questions as possible, helping us to understand the problem from the user’s perspective and business perspective. This session also outlined the technical constraints and project timeline.
The kick off session left us with a clear understanding the key user and business requirements.
To observe the current pain points and issues with the existing income processing method, I conducted a usability test. From this, I could better understand where to improve the existing income processing method.
After the conducting the usability tests, I also carried out user interviews with the underwriters. This helped to confirm where the pain points lie, see where they felt the improvements could be made and learn more about their general attitudes towards the existing income processing method.
Opportunity: Use our decisioning engine to help pre-categorise the transaction list, helping the underwriters find the customers income more easily.
Opportunity: Create a dashboard where all income processing can be completed in one place.
Opportunity: Auto-input the results into the SalesForce Dashboard so the underwriter can quickly review and save it.
The underwriters felt there were clear issues with the current income processing method which impacted efficiency.
As a limited number of participants took part in the usability tests and user interviews, a satisfaction survey was sent out to the wider underwriting team. This provided a baseline satisfaction rating for the current income processing method and also provided further evidence of what issues needed improving. The survey was completed by 15 participants.
The survey showed that the satisfaction rating of the current system was only 4.73/10.
To visualise the opportunities for improvement and pain points in the current flow, I created a user story map. User story mapping also helped to align all the stakeholders as the visualisation made it easier to understand where the improvements could be made.
User story maps helped to visualise each step the underwriter would take in the journey and prioritise features.
Now that we understood where the improvements could be made, I created a user flow for the new income processing method to clearly understand each step the user has to take to process a customer application.
User flows helped to discover how many screens will be required for a user to complete a goal and assisted in finding any glaring errors in our journey maps.
To ensure that the design changes could be evaluated, I defined a set of quantitative data points used to measure, compare, and track the user experience of the income processing platform.
Defining key metrics will allow me to evaluate the success of the project in the long term.
After understanding how the user will complete tasks through the user flows, I created low fidelity wireframes to show the high-level functionalities of each screen.
I then presented the low-fidelity wire flow to the head of underwriting and head of loan underwriting to see if there were any flaws or omissions in the designs. I find that it is much easier for stakeholders to understand wire flows rather than user flows as the additional visual aids of the wireframes help them better understand the design solution.
These low fidelity wireframes were then refined and improved upon based on the feedback received.
After completing the initial sketches, I received actionable feedback and tips to improve the designs in specific areas.
Using the feedback provided on the low-fidelity wireframes, I was able to create a more well-rounded high fidelity design.
To help the senior stakeholders view the design solution “in action”, I created an interactive prototype using Figma. This prototype was reviewed again by the head of underwriting, head of loan underwriting and Chief Commercial Officer.
For this iterations, only minor changes were suggested.
After receiving positive feedback from all the stakeholders, the design solutions were now ready to be tested.
Using a prototype of the new design, another usability test was conducted with four members of the underwriting team to see if the issues from the existing system had been solved.
The participants were given different scenarios of loan applications to process and were asked to walk through how they would process these applications.
After receiving positive feedback from the target users, only minor UI fixes were now required.
Based on the usability tests, only minor changes to the UI were required for the initial release of the income processing platform.
Due to the time constraints of the project, I then worked with the project manager, head of underwriting and CCO to define there requirements for the initial release and the Day 2 release. Using the results of the usability tests we could verify what was essential for the initial release.
The prototype and wire flow in Figma were then adjusted to reflect the requirements for the initial release and Day 2 release.
The results of the usability tests were used to verify what was essential for the initial release.
The key results have been defined based on the metrics established at the start of the project.
This means there was over a 70% improvement in efficiency, allowing us to process more loan applications and therefore increase the total loans disbursed.
Based on the key metrics established from the onset, we can see that the project has been a success.
Having a kick off session with all the key stakeholders, developers and project manger to discuss the project requirements and timeline made the project run smoothly from beginning to end.
As this was an internal project to improve the business’ efficiency, being able to quickly verify my assumptions and design changes by speaking directly to the end user was very extremely useful. This allowed me to quickly iterate my design solutions which was essential due to the time constraints of the project.
We had a tight time constraint for this project as there was external pressure to improve the way we process loan applications. Therefore it was key to release an initial improvement on our current system quickly and then improve it iteratively as time went on.
