Collecting appraisal payments
Xpanse is a FinTech startup aiming to disrupt the mortgage industry. Xpanse’s Podium platform enables lenders to order and manage mortgage products like title, appraisals, and verification of employment.
My contributions
Created space for research and design through the creation of a Gantt chart.
Research, design, and evaluation of a new mortgage order fulfillment product.
Redesigned Podium product with new design system.
Problem
How might we allow loan associates to collect appraisal payments from borrowers?
Our team’s main goal was to retire an existing order fulfillment platform and replace it with a more modern, user-friendly system. We aimed to launch an MVP of the payments feature as quickly as possible.
Background
Creating space for research and design
One of the first systemic problems I addressed on my team was the limited time given for research and design for new features. For one particular project, I was given 3-4 days from kickoff until backend dev work began. I needed more time to do anything meaningful. Building off of the release milestones, I worked backwards to create a Gantt chart that included research and design.
Gantt chart used to influence roadmap
Discovery
User story map
As I gathered information through research, I began work on a user story map. I find user story maps are excellent artifacts for creating shared understanding of sequential flows. I honed the map with my product manager and then setup time with engineering representatives to review of the map. I feel it’s important to get engineering involved as early as possible to look for risks and unanswered questions.
Reducing scope
Based on the user story map, the lead backend engineer pointed out a concern about one of the optional steps in the flow. Being able to add additional payments to an order would be very complicated and risk our timeline. Because this was surfaced so early in the process, the product manager and I were able to negotiate a simpler solution for this edge case. This change significantly reduced the project’s engineering scope and made our deadline more attainable.
Iteration and validation
Simplify order placement
The existing order placement workflow was maximized for more complicated products like title and close. Users placing the payment orders only need a few pieces of information to complete their tasks: name, email, address. I recommended simplifying payment orders to speed up the process and reduce unnecessary data entry.
Moving forward
The engineering team had no concerns and estimated the work to be within our timelines. The main stakeholder at our client lender liked the simplicity and gave us the green light for usability testing.
Larger user flow
Loan associates create payment orders.
Additional screen details
Response and future considerations
The mortgage industry experienced extreme difficulties during the time of this project and the team was laid off a week before the feature was scheduled to go to production. Consequently, I don’t have access to qualitative feedback or analytics for this feature.
Analytics
While I wasn’t able to see the quantitative feedback for this feature, I did setup Pendo to track its usage. Specifically I advocated for a small engineering task to expose additional product permissions in the front-end. This additional information allowed me to create a user segment in Pendo to target activity for the payments feature.