I was involved in a lot of research activities while working on this project. It was a really immersive experience. The objective of this app was to create a loan origination app with the best usability for the mortgage loan officers.
I started off by having one-on-ones with the loan officers. Here, I sat alongside three loan officers and watched them while they went about talking to the customers on the phone gathering leads. It was an eye-opener for me. I took notes of this contextual enquiry.
Then we conducted a workshop with the high performing loan officers to understand the loan application process and the pain points they face in their current app. From the notes that came out of this exercise we created an elaborate journey map with sticky notes. From this journey map, that we had up on the wall, we did an affinity mapping and identified the top 10 most wanted features.
User stories were created for these features. I worked with a UX Designer who created the wireframes. I took these wireframes to create the visual design mockups.
I brought in my expertise in usability to create the top navigation, and the sidebar for the loan officers to easily access the lengthy screen with 200 fields.
After I completed the mockups, we created tasks for the users, and conducted usability testing with 30 users and evaluated the results. We gathered the feedback, and made the appropriate changes to the screens. Overall, this was an awesome project with research at the helm of all decisions that were made to the UI.
