Ellie Mae is an enterprise mortgage software company. The company is working on automating and streamlining the mortgage process from initial application to selling off the loan in the secondary market. The software helps lenders lower the costs and time to close the loan. Currently, ~40% of the mortgages in the United States pass through the software. Until recently, Ellie Mae was a desktop client, but now we are migrating our platform to the web.
It's a no brainer that one of the major components of processing a mortgage is documents. A loan is made up of a lot of documents like the ones uploaded by the borrower (like pay stubs and bank statements), sent by other agencies (like credit and title reports) and generated by the lender as part of the loan processing (like disclosures). Every document is an essential element to verify the lending decision.
Since document management and processing is at the heart of any mortgage loan, making it an efficient process not only increases the productivity of the lenders but reduces the cost of closing the loan.
While handling thousands of loan documents is in itself a daunting task, the system is made more complicated by the number of user groups that are collaborating in this space. Although many user groups touch the system at various touchpoints during the mortgage process, primarily three users collaborate closely to verify the documents-
This was a long-running project and thus, the work on the document management platform was divided into three different sub-phases
I was the UX designer on the team and was involved in the product development lifecycle, starting from research to delivery. I collaborated closely with the researchers, PMs, BAs, and the dev team to simplify requirements, design assets, and implement the solution.
Two parallel research efforts informed the design of the doc platform. One was geared towards understanding users' tasks by cataloging day in the life of loan officers. The other was focused on understanding their mobile-specific needs/ tasks. For assisting the researchers, I created research assets for mobile research. Working with PM and UX researchers, I mocked different feature sets for mobile that the researcher used to probe the user. This research helped us in creating a prioritized list of tasks that users would perform on mobile.
I will discuss the insights, pain-points, and respective solutions in detail below.
Ellie Mae's mobile application lacked most of the useful features that the users need. Other interface issues rendered the app less usable. For example, some of the screens had multiple navigation bars and floating action buttons, and a lot of inconsistent patterns were used across the app for similar tasks. Thus, users ended up using a lot of custom-built apps or solutions to accomplish specific tasks as simple as taking pictures and uploading to the system.
The current platform was a windows-based, so it used certain patterns that are used commonly in desktop applications but not scalable to the web, for example, the ability to open multiple windows. This meant, while the tasks between the web and desktop applications were the same, the patterns used would have to be redesigned. This potentially would have added a learning curve for the users where they would have to re-learn how to perform certain tasks.
Also, the desktop solution itself had certain usability issues around inconsistent use of patterns, confusing terminology, and chaotic information layout, that would have to be fixed while translating those requirements over to the web/mobile channels.
The mobile design was tested with 5 participants. The redesigned navigation pattern was loved by all the users. Even the users who had never used this platform to perform the task were able to easily navigate through the app using it.
The product was launched in March 2019 during the Ellie Mae experience conference.
UX team lead research session with all stakeholders listening in to the session. Because of this, most of the stakeholders aligned with users and the UX team. Due to active collaboration with developers, we were able to ensure that we didn't break the user experience as the product evolved. We designed not only the MVP version but the whole growth trajectory for the product.
I can't share a lot of details about the wireframes since this project is under NDA. I would love to talk more about it in person or on call.