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

Let's face it, first time home buying is complex

📹 Storytelling is important. That's why my PM and I put this together this video off how our new flow was 3x faster than the old flow.

Zippy got it’s start as a company by digitizing a paper driven process of getting a loan to buy an affordable manufactured home. The scrappy team built a process which hobbled together excel sheets with tools like Floify and Asana to create a messy, inefficient way to get borrowers access to a loan.

I was hired at Zippy as the first designer to help take this Frankenstein process and create its first true product—a Loan Origination System where borrowers could easily apply for a loan, submit information, and have Underwriters approve them for a loan.

I worked with a PM and 2 Engineers to redesign to create an efficient way for Underwriters to request conditions to the borrower and to quickly approve and deny them.

By creating our first product around the business's most complicated workflow, we’ve made it easier to process conditions which has reduced time and friction it takes for a borrower to get into their first home.

Let's face it, first time home buying is complex

📹 Storytelling is important. That's why my PM and I put this together this video off how our new flow was 3x faster than the old flow.

Business Outcomes

New Features

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.