Zippy: Helping Americans get faster and equitable access to home ownership
Designing a new loan processing system to reduce the amount of time for borrowers to get loans on first time homes
Disciplines
Product Design, User Research
Industry
Mortgage Lending
Duration
2 months
Templates for Conditions Assignment
Conditions templates for easy assignment of the most common documents so Underwriters don't need to write them entirely from scratch
Role Based Access and Personalized Views
By giving all personas who touch this process their own view and set of actions, we're able to reduce handoffs and give a clear indication of who's turn it is in the assembly line
A Single Platform to Assign, Edit, and Submit Conditions
Reduces friction and cognitive loan in having to juggle multiple systems and reduces stopgaps by offering a single pane of glass
What did we learn?
The Art of the Engineering Handoff
Since Product is a new discipline at Zippy, my Engineer and I met early and often to talk through what makes an efficient handoff. We reviewed old post mortems to see what we could improve and noticed in the past that development time was wasted because we didn’t validate feasibility and there was not enough context made available to our engineers.
To combat this, I brought our Engineer in early to some of our conversations to validate and experiment on some early ideations to confirm they could be made. I also left as many dev notes as possible in Figma which virtually reduced the amount of questions I received during the actual development cycle.
Information Architecture as a powerful skillset for Product Design
By my estimate, over half of this project was understanding how our business systems team had pieced together the current Frankenstein process and how information flowed from one system to another.
There is no way we could architect a better data flow if we didn’t maniacally catalog how current data flowed down to each individual field. Doing the upfront work to understand our architecture helped inform our designs and develop this Product on schedule.
Less is not always more
Not all personas demand less detail and information in Western interfaces. it’s easy to assume that users want less in noise in their apps. Although true with our external borrower persona, what surprised me after interviews with our internal teams is their affinity for more detail and more context all on one view.
In many interviews, our internal teams didn’t even realize the own efficiencies of the Frankenestein process they had been trained on and asked for even more clutter.
Our role as designers is to hypothesize where there’s friction and ask the right questions to uncover it and improve everyone’s experiences. That said, you can’t assume pain just because you yourself find it confusing.
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