Designed a document submission tool that streamlined mortgage brokers' workflow, resulting in a reduction of document retrieval time from 1 week to 3 days.
By collaborating closely with mortgage brokers and our backend development team, I designed a document submission tool that streamlined the brokers’ work in retrieving required documents for mortgage approval. Since launch, 47% of applications completed had at least one document submitted via this tool, and it shortened the time it took for brokers to gather application documents from days to minutes.
When a customer applies for a mortgage via Ratehub’s brokerage, they need to submit documents to their agent, traditionally via email as attachments. Over time, this became a paperwork time-sink, where brokers email back and forth with customers multiple times to retrieve all the documents needed. Ratehub wanted to digitalize this document submission process with the following goal:
Streamline brokers’ work in retrieving documents prior to application review.
I was tasked to design a user-friendly interface that achieves this goal.
I wanted to understand the broker’s experience in this documentation process. I interviewed a few brokers to find out exactly what they need to do to prepare their customer’s application package for the lenders. I discovered that by adding a document upload feature, they can significantly shorten the time to close a deal, meaning that they can get paid faster.
The interviews also unearthed a few pain points in the nitty gritty of being a mortgage broker.
I distilled my findings into 2 distinct jobs-to-be-done (JTBD).
Agent JTBD: “I want to receive all the required documents from my customers in one place without excessive back-and-forth communication, so I can close deals faster.”
Customer JTBD: “I want to collect and upload the required list of documents accurately and efficiently, so I have one less thing to stress about.”
The MVP went live for a month. Within this test period:
28% of applications were submitted with at least 1 document uploaded.
Average time it took a broker to collect documents reduced from 5 days to 2 days.
28%
Customer usage rate
3 days
Reduction in time to collect docs
The MVP had cut out some back and forth communications and removed the manual steps of uploading docs into Salesforce. Our next step was to categorize the documents so that it serves as a to-do list for customers while helping the brokers sort and identity document types ahead of time.
So I worked on developing the final UI for the winning concept from our workshop. During this process, I created prototypes of this new flow and tested with 10 users I recruited from Usertesting.com.
Never miss a doc with pre-categorized sections and auto-save feature
The sectioned upload boxes double as a check list for customers. This eliminates the stress of worrying if they missed something. The uploaded documents also stay in the customer's logged in account unless they are deliberately deleted.
Upload driver licences and other physical docs with native mobile features
Identify the type of documents without additional work from the customers
The categorized documents arrive in the broker's Salesforce UI already tagged and sortable.
Customers can name the files in any irrelevant ways without adding to the broker's cognitive load.
Salesforce notifications can be triggered by a complete or partial submission of documents. The broker can either reach out personally or set up an auto reminder.
The new release resulted in an average 2 days turnaround for the doc collection process. The brokers were happy with the email notification and pre-categorization features. As a result, they were more willing to encourage their customers to use it.
We hit a 47% usage rate in the first year.
53% of these uploads were via a mobile device.
47%
Customer usage rate
53%
Uploads using mobile devices
The online experience is influenced by the offline experience
The mortgage web app has always been a desktop-heavy experience based on historical data. Our previous research told us that customers feel more secured and prepared with big screens while doing serious work. However, the action of collecting and uploading documents was a truly multi-devices experience and we would not have known that had we not examined the physical steps our customers took to collect documents in such details.
It's important to know when to step back
The team was really pumped about the post-MVP design idea during our workshop. There were attempts to adopt the "build it and they'll use it" mindset. However, I'm proud of our team's restrain in stepping back and letting the numbers talk first before further investing.
Iterate, iterate, iterate
I wish that there were more time to do more usability testings between the MVP and the Post-MVP launches. One thing that we identified as a confusion point was that some customers thought that by uploading the documents, they would have been submitted to the brokers. This was not the case because the system needed a final ("submit") signal to send those files to Salesforce. As we continue to monitor the submission rate, I'm hoping there will be more rounds of iterations to improve customer experience.