OVERVIEW

About Streamloan

The mortgage process on average takes over 40 days to close. Streamloan is a SaaS company looking to speed up this process for both borrowers and loan officers by streamlining workflows into a single platform.

For this project, we added a pull credit feature for the loan officer view across Streamloan’s iOS apps, and desktop web platforms.

 THE PROBLEM

Loan officers are unable to initiate credit pull for borrowers within Streamloan

THE OPPORTUNITY

Add a pull credit feature accounting for all borrower use cases from the loan officer’s view to…

1. Reduce the number of platforms needed to process a mortgage loan

2. Reduce overall time needed to close a loan

RESULTS SUMMARY

Jump right back into the mortgage process, anytime, anywhere.

Loan officers are active in their day-to-day duties. It is important for the newly added feature to be frictionless, secure, and consistent across all of Streamloan’s compatible platforms and devices to encourage on-the-go use. We adopted a mobile-first design process as smaller screens present the greatest constraints.

Final Screens

Market Research

Researching soft credit pulls

Due to privacy reasons, we had limited visibility of the interfaces of loan operating systems. To research commonly used design patterns, our team did a comparative analysis of the flows of soft credit pulls on B2C personal finance apps.

Insight Summary

Overall, personal finance apps have to appear simple, friendly, yet trustworthy. Common design patterns include:

• Concise, spotlight-style form fields

• Easy, yet secure authentication measures

  • SSN, two factor authentication, biometric login methods

• Animated loading screens

  • Credit reports can take a moment to sync with the app, moving animations or text on loading screens reassures the user that their request is in progress

• Scannable credit report summary

  • Use of letter grades, color coding to show strengths and weaknesses at a glance

User Research

Sample Selection

We interviewed 4 loan officers currently using Streamloan to understand the process of a hard credit pull.

Insight Summary

The interviews helped us acquire industry-specific knowledge and an understanding of user needs. Here are the top findings:

• Most loan officers operate on desktop; all are open to going mobile

• Joint files from married couples are the most common borrower use cases

• Loan officers have established processes when ordering credit

  • i.e. Preferred credit agencies and credit bureaus

SOLUTIONS

Our users were heavily involved in our design process. We sought feedback from loan officers with each iteration to ensure our designs met their needs and aligned with industry processes. Here is how we came to solutions for the following key features.

Key Feature 1: Credit Action Buttons

Placement of the credit action buttons determined accessibility of the flow and also the structure of forms and libraries.

Key Feature 2: Presets and Automation

Loan officers often have established processes when ordering credit, allowing their preferences to be saved on Streamloan can reduce repetitive work.

Key Feature 3: Adding Co-borrowers

The ability to add co-borrowers to an account easily is essential. For this feature, we had to make choices between flexibility and simplicity.

Key feature 4: Credit Report Summary

A credit report summary gives loan officers a quick snapshot of credit scores and liabilities.

Final Deliverable

Validation Testing

Final Prototype Testing (n=4)

Task 1: Refresh joint credit for Priya and Akhil
Task 2: Order credit for Madhu

4/4 users successfully completed both tasks

4/4 users would use presets to improve work efficiency

4/4 users felt that the in-app order credit feature would save time

2/4 users felt that the process was secure and reliable*

*Most participants were uncertain about automated processes such as 1003 form auto-population and LOS autosync features. They feel inclined to validate these features manually.

RETROSPECTIVE

For this project, a good amount of time was spent understanding the intricacies of the mortgage loan application process. To stay within timeline constraints, we relied heavily on Streamloan loan officers for industry-specific knowledge and guidance on design options. Although including users throughout the design process has its advantages, it lead to an over-reliance on qualitative feedback from a small sample. To account for potential biases, it would help to collect more quantitative data from a larger set of users in more structured tests.