LoanSafe Connect, Mortgage Loan
Senior Product Designer
Mortgage Loan Platform Tool Product Growth
Led design for second phase of product rebuild for industry leading mortgage loan tool LoanSafe Connect, which identifies fraud when approving lender loans. The first phase transformed the product by rebuilding its platform to align with modern software development. This next phase included expanding the user-base by learning about the needs of management teams for Tier 1 customers at enterprise organizations and defining features that to accommodate those workflows.
The goal was to develop a strategy then join the software team to build validated product features that align with the specific workflows of this new user-base. The research team which consisted of a Product Manager, a Product Designer (myself), a UI Designer, and a Product Owner, discovered an opportunity to add reporting tools to the product. This tested well with users and was added to the backlog for agile development of the growing product.
Update:
The feature set defined became a key selling point for CoreLogic. As a result of the product strategy developed on this project, LoanSafe Connect saw a 25% increase in enterprise sales during the six months following release of new features plus this remains a key selling point today. Also, the design patterns created for our reporting tools (particularly the graphs) were adopted by the company's design system and later implemented for other products in the family.
Top Skills: Qualitative Research, Design Strategy, Product Design, Product Development, IA/UX/UI, System Thinking, Visual Design, Prototyping, Project Management, Agile Practices
Business Goals
Target Tier 1 customers such as Chase Bank, Well's Fargo, SunTrust, Supreme Lending, and others.
Close competitor gap with product offerings and validate features with end-users.
This was also a transformation project for CoreLogic team members.
Exploratory Research
Facilitated open-ended exploratory research at enterprise organizations across the country.
Talking to executives can be interesting, this President (above) diagrammed his company goals and product wants. A few of our other participants are pictured below.
Mapping Workflows
While research was still in-progress we began mapping our user workflows and naming personas.
The above whiteboard was updated several times throughout the discovery process and ultimately became a core tool for research analysis. Sticky notes map to synthesis boards.
Research Synthesis
We used infinity mapping to find common patterns of behavior and needs across all interview participants.
Key Research Insights
Despite allocating resource for data analysis a gap still exists for gaining actionable insights.
The mortgage loan industry is a volume business thus meeting Service Level Agreements (SLAs) is the top priority.
At Tier 1 orgs, work is segmented into many specialized roles.
Persona Development
We created validated personas to take forward into product development.
Persona Mapping by Role & Product Phases
Primary Persona
Secondary Persona
Concept Ideation
With validated personas we were able to gather a cross-functional group to brainstorm concepts that meet persona needs.
The ideation session included our product team along with designers, engineers, data scientists, and product managers from other teams.
Scenario Writing
To further empathize with our primary persona and identify features for the prioritized concepts, we led a scenario writing exercise.
Concept Sketching
The scenario writing led to a quick understanding of features for concept sketching workshops of flows and wireframes.
Sketching user flows after developing our product strategy
Validated our concepts with internal stakeholders and passersby.
Concept Validation
Whiteboard sketches were high-fidelity enough for concept validation with CoreLogic stakeholders and account managers.
This was partly due to an existing design system and UI patterns we could utilize for layout.
strategy Validation
Worked closely with the Product Manager who led business prioritization and competitive analysis for product strategy.
Concepts prioritized by persona needs and resource cost:
Persona needs compared against business goals:
Review of competitive analysis in alignment with feature concepts:
From Wireframe Sketch to Prototype
Our annotated wireframe sketches, with feedback from the validation sessions, were a guide for designing the first prototype.
Design System
Building within an existing pattern library led to creating high-fidelity prototypes, providing richer feedback from user testing.
Team maintained a live style guide which synced directly to the product.
Applied Patterns for Page Template
High-Fidelity Wireframes & Interactions
Designing New Patterns
Graphs used in reporting were a new addition to the design pattern library and we explored various approaches.
Defined UI Interactions
Extreme Programming Team
Once the product growth strategy and concept was validated, our discovery team joined the extreme programming team.
We worked in iterative cycles to build LoanSafe Connect with weekly testing and design for upcoming stories in the backlog.
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