Streamlining Complex Loan Workflows
- Through user research, discovered loan officers spent 30 seconds per document access navigating between screens
- With 20-40 document reviews daily, this represented up to 20 minutes of lost productivity per user per day
- Conducted one-on-one interviews with 8 different teams to understand workflows and pain points
- Created detailed workflow maps visualizing how the fragmented system created inefficiencies
Overview
In the APEX loan origination system, agents struggled with a fragmented workflow spread across three separate tabs (Progress, Requirements, and Verification). This caused significant time waste, increased error risk, and user frustration due to constant context switching and redundant information across interfaces.
Research & Impact Analysis
Capital Markets
Deal monitoring and compliance checks
Credit Team
Financial document review and analysis
Inside Sales
Document verification and requirement tracking
Loan Ops
Requirement management and verification
Outside Sales
Initial document collection and requirement review
Personas & JTBD
How it worked
Rework and duplication, as teams manually compiled information across tabs.
Redundancy
Lack of visibility into the status of a deal, slowing down decision-making and fulfillment.
Poor Visibility
Lost time and inefficiency tracking requirements, artifacts, and communications.
Inneficiency
Constant context switching to complete a single task.
Fragmentation
The primary goal was to streamline the APEX loan origination system by consolidating a fragmented workflow that was spread across three separate tabs (Progress, Requirements, and Verification) into a more efficient, unified interface.
Goal
Efficiency
Cohesion
Consolidation
Productivity
Maintained continuous feedback loop with engineering and compliance teams to ensure technical feasibility and regulatory compliance
Stakeholder Collaboration
Integrated essential functions into unified workflow solution while maintaining system reliability and data integrity
Feature Integration
Built and refined interactive Figma prototypes demonstrating the consolidated interface concept with emphasis on user-friendly navigation
Prototyping
Validated solutions through systematic user testing with multiple user groups and incorporated feedback into iterative improvements
User Testing
Design
Design development proceeded through iterative cycles:
The discovery phase focused on understanding core workflow challenges through structured research:
Identified and prioritized critical pain points in deal tracking, requirements management, and user experience through systematic analysis
Pain Point Assessment
Created comprehensive visual workflow diagrams highlighting system inefficiencies and bottlenecks in the current three-tab system
Process Analysis
Conducted detailed interviews with loan operations teams to map existing processes and document key workflows across departments
Research Phase
Discovery
Anthony Riddle
Director of Product
Provided strategic direction and business alignment
Danny Oh
Product Manager
Owned requirements gathering and business outcomes
Nathan Thomas
Senior Product Designer
Led UX research, design, and prototyping
Josh Shroy
Tech Lead
Guided technical implementation and feasibility
The Team
The Results
The consolidation project transformed our loan origination workflow with impressive results. By eliminating the need to switch between tabs, our teams gained significant efficiency in their daily operations. The introduction of an innovative side drawer feature revolutionized how teams review and compare documents simultaneously. The streamlined system now offers more efficient requirement management with inline editing and verification capabilities. Teams also benefit from enhanced visibility of critical information through unified progress tracking. Perhaps most importantly, the intuitive, role-based interface design has reduced the learning curve and training requirements for new users.