Digital Mortgages App
Design project involving the creation of a digital mortgages app. The key goal of the system was to speed up the process of obtaining a mortgage from 6 weeks to 1 day.
Project Type
Internal project for a management consultancy firm, to be sold to banks.
Team
11 consultants
Duration
12 weeks
Role
I was a service designer within a team of business analysts, software developers, designers and project managers. I assisted with researching the process of mortgage applications and conducting the competitors’ analysis, before constructing user flows and journeys for the new app.
The Challenge
At the time of the project, the estimated duration of the mortgage approval process was six weeks. Additionally, service users needed to find and submit at least a dozen documents manually, which would then be processed by a bank. This is a time consuming and error-prone process. We wanted to automate the process of obtaining and processing user documentation, reducing manual entry as far as possible, while upholding security and integrity of data.
Our target user group included anyone interested in obtaining a mortgage, whether they were first time buyers, or people looking to remortgage. These users would not be technical or financial experts, suggesting the need for an intuitive and simple interface.
Funding for the project depended on finding buyers for the system; consequently, our design had to be brand agnostic yet easily adaptable for a specific bank. We had to produce a minimum viable product with demonstrable value for customers within 3 months in order to continue funding.
The Solution
Following detailed research into the mortgage application process, we conducted rapid empathy mapping and service design ideation sessions, focusing on the tasks users would need to perform within the app, and the potential use cases they would encounter.
The final map included three user journeys which cascaded into each other: the ‘happy path’ involved the user successfully connecting to their bank account, uploading all the desired documents, and having their details scraped by the system automatically. This would provide live and automatic feedback on the user’s documentation, eliminating the time and effort needed for a bank to manually process documents, as was our objective.
User Journey Mapping
A key design challenge was the management of exceptions and errors. Alternative flows were constructed to account for the various exceptions which could occur: these included document errors, identity errors, and system errors. We worked with the tech team to anticipate errors, decide how to communicate errors to the user, and help them recover.
For instance, if a user uploaded an unsupported document type, they would receive a descriptive error message including a list of the accepted document types. They would also be given the opportunity to manually fill in the details if they were unable to find the correct document, promoting flexibility.
Handling Exceptions & Errors
Results
Outcome: My internship ended before the completion of the full project, but I achieved my personal goal of conceptually designing the system. I successfully finalised the user journey map and handed over to the UX designer to start prototyping for user testing. By including exceptions and undesirable user flows in the journey, I ensured that my colleagues could explicitly design for all potential outcomes rather than solely focusing on the happy path.
Lessons learned: In the early stages of the project, more frequent liaison with the tech team would have been beneficial, as many initial ideas were later scrapped due to not being technologically feasible. In the future, I will endeavour not to get stuck in the “designer bubble”.