THE ISSUES
The mortgage warehouse team handles all the mortgage-related tasks in Comerica Bank, up from client contacting Relationship Managers, down to the Processing team allocating payments. Communication between different roles and with customers is very crucial. However, there’s no efficient way to achieve that. Plus, there are several systems the teams use to facilitate the process. Most of the systems are outdated, complicated, and not user friendly.
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The UX team’s mission is to clarify the workflow and provide suggestions on how to improve the usability of the current systems.
Mortgage Workflow Improvement
User Interviews | Personas | Journey Maps
THE METHODS
A series of one-on-one interviews were performed to understand the workflow and obtain user feedback. The sessions consisted of 45-60 min moderated interviews both remote and / or in-person with 18 distributed participants representing a range of roles.
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Three types of deliverables are generated after analyzing the interview notes:
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Personas – fictional characters representing the key audience segments
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Persona Landscape – a layout of the personas and their relationship to one another
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Journey Maps – visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal
FINDINGS
We found that customers generally have a good relationship with Comerica. The business side also expressed a lot of praise for the operations team. Some larger issues were around outdated software causing workarounds. Additional drawbacks were around the process, generally about the latency of notification and information not being automated.
Persona 1 - Versatile Vera
Vera, the Processor, is the point of contact for the customer and moves their transactions along. She depends on the system heavily, therefore needs a system that allows her to efficiently accomplish the tasks. Some of the main roadblocks include the clutter in UI and process and the system showing error messages without providing troubleshooting steps.
Persona 2 - Manual Mark
Mark is on the Compliance team. Compliance is responsible for making sure that everything is neat for both customers and the bank which can be challenging with a cluttered system.
Being able to efficiently sort through data is an important aspect. Moreover, E-mail organization is paramount but can be overwhelming currently.
Journey Map - Shipping Team
Timely Thomas is a member of the shipping team. As a shipper, Thomas has a fixed routine every day. The system should help him reduce the workload, not adding unnecessaries. One of the key issues he encountered is that the same report is generated 5 times a day with only client information changed. It’s a waste of paper and contains redundant information.