Mortgage Origination system
Designing the next competitor in mortgage origination
Elphi is a startup aiming to disrupt the mortgage industry by creating tools that streamline the mortgage origination process through automated smart tasks.
After securing its first lending partner, Elphi wants to bring its SaaS product to the next level. My team was tasked with creating the main dashboard and redesigning the applicant loan pages. Our primary audience would be the mortgage underwriters, but we should factor in Elphi expanding to other services in the future into our final design.
Our design focuses on simplifying borrower application workflows and optimizing workload management for underwriters. We also crafted a visual identity that aligns more closely with the brand’s values and vision.
A centralized dashboard gives underwriters a clear, at-a-glance view of all their assigned loans, tasks, and updates, helping them manage their workload efficiently and stay on top of loan progress.
High-level summary of each loan, allowing underwriters to quickly assess key details and dive deeper into tasks and updates when necessary, all from a single, organized interface.
A cleaner, more organized layout that streamlines access to critical loan details, allowing underwriters to navigate tasks and borrower information with ease.
Kickoff meeting
During the first half of the kickoff meeting, everyone from the group had questions regarding their portion of the project. I took the time to ask questions of the team regarding their expectations and how they currently feel about the product:
Some questions I asked:
What are the specific features or functionalities expected in this redesign for the dashboard, borrower profile, and loan application form?
What features or functionalities do you believe are lacking in the current system?
In your opinion, what are the blockers preventing this product from being the product you’ve envisioned?
Do you have an example of how it should look?
The second half of the kickoff meeting was spent going over the previous and current version of Elphi's product.
Version 2.0! Still created by development, this version offered tools specific to underwriting. While underwriters did use this version, there was room for improvement.
Here is where we came in - our goal was to create the product that Elphi had always envisioned. Our design should be reflective of Elphi's brand as a modern fintech startup. While our primary users would be underwriters, we had create a design that was able to expand with more services Elphi planned to add in the future.
We also reviewed the LOS process and the expectations for Elphi’s MVP. This process shows the life of a loan from start to finish but doesn’t provide the specific method that happens in loan underwriting. We’ll come back to that.
research
Ellie Mae’s Encompass is a comprehensive mortgage platform known for its advanced automation, end-to-end loan processing, and compliance management. Large institutions use it for its ability to handle high loan volumes and third-party integrations, though it does have a learning curve.
Mortgage Cadence excels in customizability, allowing lenders to tailor workflows and processes to their unique needs. While it’s powerful for organizations with specialized requirements, the complexity and setup time can be challenging.
Mortgagebot offers a simple, user-friendly solution for smaller lenders, providing fast loan processing and cloud-based accessibility. It’s ideal for institutions seeking an easy-to-implement, streamlined mortgage system without complex customization.
7 interviews were conducted: 2 from each seniority tier and 1 manager, ensuring our core user base was equally represented. The following are insights gathered from these sessions and initial solution thoughts:
Define
How might we…
How might we…
How might we…
design
Remember the LOS pipeline from earlier? Well, before anything else, we must address the information architecture by tackling how flows are visualized and product layout. As elphi wants to offer other mortgage services in the future, flexible structures will ensure that new features can be easily integrated without compromising user experience.
During this project, we had limited time with our underwriters. We had to use our time wisely meaning we couldn't get their opinion on every decision early on. As such, we worked through low-fidelity as a team before creating the mid-fidelity design we felt we could continue with.
Below is the first attempt and overall feedback
With feedback in hand, we continued to refine the dashboard. I felt that 'less is more' was the best approach by reducing the amount of space taken up by the widgets, more space could be dedicated to loans. Although we agreed to move forward with this design, we still had questions to answer - how can we show loan and task progression?
One feedback we constantly received was providing more information from the dashboard. The loan cards offered the perfect foundation to create an expandable card. Closed by default, the expanded card will show important contacts, application specifics and a task breakdown.
For the detail pages, I changed the sub-page navigation orientation to allow for more room between elements and reduced the number of loan details to core pieces of information underwriters need to know. As tasks are now on one page, I added category dividers to mark when one section ends and another begins.
solution
Here's our prototype in action!