Problem

Current CaseMan is not a solution that is fit for purpose to allow successful underwriting of all current and future products that LiveMore Mortgages wish to offer it's customers.It does not allow UW and CMs to efficiently underwrite a mortgage offer and gives rise to too much risk due to manual process and lack of automation

Solution

CaseMan is the UW team’s preferred tool for underwriting mortgage applications, designed for ease and intuitiveness.
Visual cues will assist in decision-making, while automation minimizes manual data entry, allowing the team to focus on high-value activities.

As the single system of record, CaseMan will provide accessible information for all business areas and support external messaging to enhance underwriting tools. It will support Broker Journey improvements through case tracking, automated updates, document management, and messaging.

CaseMan’s user-friendly and flexible design ensures scalability, making it adaptable to future needs and enhancements.

User Persona

To understand our users' goals, needs, and behaviors, we conducted interviews and surveys, creating a persona that captured the key traits of an underwriting team member. This persona was continuously refined with new data and served as a vital reference, helping us stay user-centered and reassess our ideas.
The user persona guided our design decisions and feature prioritization, fostering team collaboration and ensuring alignment with user needs and characteristics.

Design Workshops: Fostering Collaboration and Transformation

We organized collaborative design workshops with the Underwriting team, aiming to create a comfortable environment for open expression. Visual plans clarified the workshop agenda and timeline, helping guide the process.
We began with rapid prototyping, where team members shared creative solutions to the design problem. Using dot testing, we identified the most promising elements for our solution. Some workshops included prioritization exercises to define essential features for the Minimum Viable Product (MVP).Challenges arose as the Underwriting team’s existing workflows conflicted with the proposed software. Over time and through multiple workshops, the team adapted, embracing new perspectives and letting go of outdated processes in favor of the new solution.

Next Step: Accelerating Decision-Making through Visualizations

After the design workshops, I created mid-fidelity sketches and wireframes to accelerate decision-making and maintain a clear design vision. These were informed by user interviews, business goals, workshop insights, and heuristic evaluations. The sketches kept us aligned with primary objectives and minimized flow distractions.
We then held a playback session with the Underwriting team to present and discuss the proposed layout, ensuring it met their needs. This session allowed us to validate design choices, gather feedback, and make necessary adjustments, fostering team collaboration and a sense of ownership in the final product.

Feature delivery

Scaling back every screen to ensure a smooth Minimum Viable Product (MVP) delivery of the product is a common practice in software development. By focusing on essential features and functionality, the development team can prioritize delivering a functional version of the product quickly. Scaling back can involve simplifying the user interface, removing non-essential features, or implementing basic versions of complex functionalities.
In this context, providing developers with visibility into both the MVP stage and the final desired performance for each screen is a useful approach. By understanding the end goal, developers can make informed coding decisions during the development process. This visibility helps them align their workflow with the overall product vision and make decisions that contribute to achieving the desired final performance.

By having a clear understanding of the MVP stage and the final product's performance expectations, developers could focus their efforts on implementing the core functionalities effectively. This approach ensured that the initial version of the product met the minimum requirements for user interaction and functionality. Once the MVP is delivered, the development team can iterate and add more features and improvements based on user feedback and business priorities.Overall, scaling back screens and providing developers with visibility into the MVP stage and final performance goals helped streamline the development process, ensure timely delivery of the product, and align the development team's efforts with the product's overall vision.