Encompass TPO Connect
Correspondent Mortgage Underwriting
Role: Service Design Lead
Context: Web Application
Launch: Oct 2024
My individual contribution
I was the lead product designer and product manager on a cross functional team of designers, engineers, subject matter experts, and QA testers.
I concepted, researched, designed, prototyped, and led the implementation and launch of this web and mobile application. Following the design phase, I met weekly and communicated daily with our engineering team to ensure the project was delivered feature-complete, on time, and on budget.
Research
Service Design
___ PROJECT DETAILS
Understanding the project.
About
MAKER is about empowering creative teams to focus on building compelling content rather than spending time on tedious administrative tasks.
It's an intuitive project and audit management app utilizing automation to guide workflows, ensuring HR guideline compliance and simplifying audits.
MAKER tackles challenges from a new Federated Learning Model (FLM) implementation impacting 200 Instructional Designers serving 30k+ employees across my company. With HR lacking a clear compliance process, MAKER mitigates risks, streamlines workflows, and generates an estimated annual value to my company of $16.8M through work-hour savings and penalty avoidance.
Design Challenge
I pitched this project after learning about new audit requirements from an Instructional Designer colleague. Our challenge was twofold:
Interpret HR Technology’s new mandate and create a compliant process to avoid costly fines (potentially over $100k per infraction)
Develop a solution that not only managed the increased workload but also simplified the designers' workflows beyond pre-existing standards
In short, we needed something that didn't just handle the new requirements but also made life easier for our designers compared to before.
3
Researcher(s)
1
Service Designer
3
Client Testing Events
01/
CHAPTER
Research
___ CLIENT TESTING
Target audience.
Groups that could benefit the most from MAKER automation
Creative teams are great at driving innovation and expanding the horizon of what’s possible. They aren’t always great at the administrative stuff. For many creatives, doing work about the work is the least fun part of the job.
My team and I worked closely with our sponsor in HR Technology as well as numerous subject matter experts (SMEs) from our Instructional Design teams to better understand the requirements and pain points our solution needed to solve. Their insights were key in helping us make the right decisions around roadmap planning and feature prioritization.
Correspondent Lenders
Internal Underwriters
___ CLIENT TESTING
Key findings & results.
___ COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
Understanding the competition.
Build better - together
Jira Software comes out-of-the-box with the features and best practices agile teams need to develop and evolve their agile practices.
Make work make sense
Teamwork feels like less work with Mural, the secure, flexible, visual work platform purpose-built for collaboration.
Turn data into insights
Visualize data in compelling ways.
Service Design
02/
CHAPTER
___ VALIDATING ASSUMPTIONS
Key findings & results.
___ USER FLOW
Low fidelity interactions.
Primary Persona Types
The distinction between the different personas is based on their specific roles in the MAKER process, which will determine the accesses they need. For example, a Team Admin will have the ability to add or remove members from teams, while Auditors only need to access the Audit Report function of the app.
Team Members
Admins
Approvers
Auditors
03/
CHAPTER
OUTCOMES
___ HIGH FIDELITY DESIGNS
Anatomy of an audit manager app.
AUDIT MANAGER 01
GO WITH THE FLOW
MAKER’s automated project and audit management process is a simple and intuitive way for creative teams to move artifacts from concept, design, Stakeholder review, Compliance, through product launch. MAKER gates progress by approval status, enforces file version control, and documents all relevant compliance information. The result is compliance reviews that are clean, meticulously documented, and free of human error. The app is easier and more intuitive to use than Jira, more organized than MURAL, and more aesthetically pleasing than Excel while guaranteeing artifact compliance and reducing project completion time.
AUDIT MANAGER 02
REPORTING FOR DUTY!
Archived view makes past workflows easily accessible should Teams need to review past work. Users can instantly toggle between “Active” and “Archived” view when needed.
Generating a report couldn’t be easier. Team Members or Auditors simply select the “Reports” tab, select a date range, tag in an Auditor (if desired), and hit “Generate.” A Report file is downloaded and sent to any tagged Auditors.
___ KEY FINDINGS
Measuring success.
What we did well
I proactively identified a problem that HR Technology didn’t even know they had! Without a clearly defined compliance process the company faced significant expenses in additional work hours needed to comply, as well as non-compliance risks due to human error. My solution not only solved the risks presented by these new requirements, I also improved creative teams’ workflow processes beyond what they were before. I worked quickly and efficiently with a relatively small team, and was able to deliver MVP1 as a feature complete product on time and on budget, with additional MVPs already mapped out for future features and improvements. In total, MVP 1 is making work easier for 200+ creative team members serving 30k employees and providing an estimated $16.8M/yr of value to the company in work hours saved and fines and penalties avoided.
What I learned
One lesson I learned through this process was about the mobile app. When doing our initial research users expressed an interest in a mobile companion app to complement the responsive web app. What we discovered through concept testing though was that most users had desk jobs and were at their computer much of the time. They preferred to interact with the app on their computer rather than their phone, and almost exclusively used the mobile app for notification purposes. This functionality was already achieved with the app’s integration with Microsoft Teams, so I determined the resources to further develop the mobile app were not warranted and deprioritize design/development. Fail fast. Learn. Improve.
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Get In Touch
Available for questions, collaborations, and projects