Real-estate Platform. Enhancing Document Ordering process
My role
In the summer of 2020, I joined a team that focused on real-estate-related products that were a part of a more extensive US company that operated in the financial services industry - Corelogic (CLGX). I’ve just been promoted to an Intermediate User Experience Designer and was looking forward to some challenges.
I was a part of a cross-functional product team of full-stack engineers, business analysts, and a product manager. As the only designer on the project, I collaborated directly with a tech lead and the product manager on solutions we presented to stakeholders.
About the Project
The project was a B2B real estate data aggregator.
How does it work? When a bank wants to issue a loan, it usually collects data about the borrower and the property.
Condominium associations or Management companies usually have the needed data about the property (a variety of documents starting from Insurance and Budget and ending with specific types of reports).
The project I worked on helped build solutions to efficiently collect and analyze this data and provide banks with needed reports.
Loan Application Process (simplified)
The challenge
One of the problems our team received was to decrease the time spent by the company’s agents. They were collecting and analyzing information on the property to close the “order” (request from a bank to get reports on the property). As the company started receiving more “orders” due to the real-estate market reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, this problem received higher priority.
What is the Process?
Before going deeper into the project, I will briefly explain how each “order” was processed. The client (a bank) used the system to place the order. The order was going into the pipeline to be processed by different agents (to simplify, one agent collected the needed documents, and the other analyzed and delivered them to the client). The project you are reading now deals with challenges the ordering team was experiencing.
Simplified overall work process. In orange - problematic stage
How Was the problematic stage identified?
I started by gathering all the data about the system and its processes by talking to engineers and stakeholders and analyzing documentation (client and new agents' onboarding documents, recorded interviews, etc.). After better understanding the domain, I explored the platform using a testing environment.
First discoveries helped identify that most bottlenecks were mainly related to collecting documents. The issue was even worse for new agents because of the significant learning curve of the software.
Job Shadowing & Analysis
After the prior analysis was completed, I spent 5 days job shadowing agents who were collecting documents. After completing my research, I first organized all the findings using Affinity mapping to transform them into a User journey map.
Why Journey mapping?
It was the best way to put the information together as agents were following a particular set of steps. It was important to draw their journey, as they often used sources from outside the system (phone calls, browsing web pages, using external resources, Excel reports).
One of the biggest gaps that I revealed in the process was when the agent had to go through more than 16 tabs looking for information required to make relevant actions to proceed with the task.
For example, to understand how to order documents, the agent needed to know which association this property was linked to, whether they were managed by an association or management company; whether the documents can be acquired directly from them or they were using third-party vendors for this, etc.
Job shadowing and interviews showed that agents experienced different issues (from how the information was organized to overall technical bugs). I analyzed their experience using 10 Usability Heuristics. It helped to group and analyze all my findings and share them with stakeholders and my team.
Flexibility and Efficiency of Use
It took 1 agent more than 16 tabs to collect the needed information about the order before even starting working on it.
“Flipping back and forth from main overview page to other tabs is an issue…That adds to the amount of clicks I need to do, you get lost in it"
Inability to assign multiple orders to one agent
“If I am processing this order, I will just click the “Assign to me“ button, but as I’m assigning to them, I’m going into each order to put his name in the Owner field”
Drop-down lists had agents that hadn’t been working for the company anymore
Inability to delete old contacts/companies (resulted in many duplicates in the system)
Manually add account managers to the order placed by the client which whom this account manager worked anyway
Visibility of the System Status
The system doesn’t indicate which contact is primary to choose from while sending document requests. Users constantly checking all the tabs to understand whether there is any information.
“Sometimes we don't have previous orders to reference, so if that's the case - we just flip the coin, select the one and hope - that's the right contact”
The System doesn’t notify if anyone else is processing the order (multiple teams can work on the same order) nor shows if the client sent any additional information. A complicated Activity Feed is the only place to find out any information.
“We don’t get any notifications, pretty much every time we need to go to the Activity feed to find anything that happened with the order - that’s a lot of scrolling”
An example how much information the Activity Feed can store for 1 order
That’s too much 🤯. What to do?
The research showed problems of different levels, starting with bugs and the need to redesign parts of the flow.
As the client wanted to achieve quick wins, together with the Product Manager, we created a list of problems, adding users’ quotes to make more connections with the existing issues.
Consolidated list of problems with T-shirt prioritization
Prioritization
We used a T-shirt method of estimation. I met with the product manager and the engineer lead to discuss and prioritize the list of issues based on both technical complexity and user value.
In the end, we grouped all our issues into four categories:
quick wins (easy to develop, high priority);
long-term goals (important for users but takes time to implement);
nice to have (easy to implement, but low user priority);
re-evaluate (low level of importance and high level of complexity).
Working on design solutions
I started by unblocking engineers for some bug fixing work, helped them define the experience, and wrote stories for the tickets that did not require UI or mockups.
Meanwhile, I focused on the long-term goal, which required more work but would get high user value. Agents should be able to get all the necessary information to start working on the order without going through 16 tabs. They were looking for an overview of received payments, existing documents, and a high-level overview of all companies they need to contact to get the required confirmation.
Overview page analysis
After analyzing the platform IA, I found that there already existed the overview page. I conducted another set of interviews with the delivery team to understand their needed overview information. The team didn’t use the overview page much, just the borrower information, as they focused more on proofreading and delivering documents.
when engineers say no 🙅
Based on the additional research, I first suggested creating two separate admin roles (for ordering and delivering agents). As two teams had different processes, individual page setups would allow them to focus on their goals.
When I brought this suggestion to our engineering team, they concluded this solution might require too much time and resources due to a legacy code.
Considering engineering feedback, I suggested an alternative solution to add the missing information to the existing page.
Existing Overview Page analysis
Interface Designing
The redesigned page had both overview information (order details, borrower information, order ownership) and new consolidated information about companies.
Instead of going through multiple tabs to get the overview, the agent can now open each company's profile from the overview page and access the needed information.
High-level information for each type of company (number of contacts, dates of requests) allowed agents to decide what to do first.
I've added the number of contacts or related documents. Previously they were checking each tab without knowing whether there was any content.
We added the "Delete" function to clean up the base.
We cleaned up the base removing old contacts.
The document request modal was updated to include the necessary information about contacts. Before ordering and paying for documents, users called or emailed companies' representatives to understand the ordering procedure. Previously, users opened the company's contact information in a separate tab to understand what contact to choose.
Suppose the company wasn't linked to the order based on its address. In that case, the agent could search and link the needed type of company without leaving the order page.
Design Validation & Impact
I didn't have time to conduct a moderate user testing session. To get the feedback, I organized a series of sessions with users to review the design concepts.
After several iterations, we finalized the design. For example, I learned that a W-9 document could be a significant stopper, and the user couldn't pay for documents without the W-9 on order. In the end, we showed this information in the company's preview.
Two weeks after the release, I sent a questionnaire to all agents to gather their feedback. Overall, we got positive feedback. We also found several bugs that were fixed in the next release.
I like that it shows all pertinent information in the profile
I like that you don't have to lose your search to check out contact info. Makes it easier to link the correct mgmt/ins.