The Company & My Role
Rocket Mortgage is an online mortgage provider. I worked as a Senior UX Designer at Rocket Pro Originate (RPO), a B2B software platform that provides tools for originating and maintaining loans from Rocket Mortgage. Users are real estate agents, insurance agents, and financial advisors who originate mortgages as a side business.
The Product
The Clients page is the home page for RPO where users can view the status of the loans they’ve originated. Users can see what stage of the mortgage process a loan is in, view contact information, and select the loan to view details. Users’ main goal on this page is to see which loans have hit a roadblock and then take action to move the mortgage forward. Here’s what the Clients page looked like before the project began:
The Problem
Users could not identify which loans stopped moving forward and which loans were getting nearer to close. Users needed a solution that would provide insight into which loans needed their attention and actionable insights to help them close loans more efficiently.
The Constraints
Rocket Pro Insight (RPI) is a similar product that shares the same codebase. RPO and RPI have distinct user bases and both products needed updates to their respective Clients page. Because of their shared codebase, the design needed to accommodate both products. Additionally, there was no precedent for how the two products and teams should work together. I would need to define collaborative vision in addition to creating a compelling experience for both products.
Requirements Gathering
The project began with an ambiguous goal: add data points to the Clients page. My first step was to define the problem and understand what users were trying to accomplish on the Clients page. I reviewed insights from a previous card sorting exercise that highlighted which data clients valued. This only told part of the story - what users valued on the current Clients page, not what they needed and what jobs they were trying to do.
I dug deeper by initiating and leading a series of user interviews to learn about user needs, habits, and jobs to be done. I interviewed account executives, Rocket employees who serve as customer support specialists to RPO users. I interviewed support bankers, which are Rocket employees who take the loans from the RPO user, take it through underwriting and eventually close the loan. Finally, I interviewed RPO users themselves. I compared the data from the three user groups and guided the product team in analysis.
The Design Process
I met with developers throughout the entire project to incorporate their feedback. I collaborated with the RPO and RPI teams across Lucid, defining the problem, sharing insights, and ideating toward solutions. There was a fair amount of churn at first. Some designers needed to be reigned in as they deviated from the core problem. But over time I built rapport and designed a solution that accommodated both products. I created basic prototype with Adobe XD and worked with a researcher in preparing a usability study.
The Delivery
The usability study was key in resolving disagreements across the two teams and refining my solution. I presented the designs to stakeholders to get their approval, and I met with the development team several more times to confirm the feasibility. My solution provided greater loan visibility and actionable insights. As of this writing the designs are currently in the dev team’s backlog.
