Loan Application dashboard design
Renew Financial specializes in offering property owners affordable financing for renewable energy and energy efficient projects through the PACE (Property Assessed Clean Energy) Program.
Situation
Contractors who help their customers acquire PACE financing rely on their application pipeline page to view and access in-process applications. The existing pipeline required the user to open the application in order to view details, ascertain status and see any conditions preventing the process from proceeding. Due to performance issues, this process was very slow and frustrating and a deterrent to contractors wanting to work with us.
Challenges
The initial design of the new Loan Application pipeline was constrained by extensive system limitations that not only required considerable design compromises but also prevented the real-time display of critical application information and posed challenges to future enhancements to meet the growing needs of the user.
In addition to these challenges, users who had existing applications in process would have to navigate between the old, legacy tool and the new loan origination system, logging into each with their own unique credentials. This not only slowed and complicated their work, it also placed a burden on them to remember which system they had to go into to access any given application.
Approach
All the above mentioned limitations, coupled with system performance issues, led the product team to engage a second development partner to build a more flexible display layer that sat between the first development partner’s system and the user. This display layer would pull and display the desired data as well as provide associated deep links back into the system. It also enabled the team to provide an integrated view and access to all applications - both those started in the new system and those that had been initiated in the legacy loan origination tool.
The design of the new integrated pipeline started with cataloging the application flows for each system and developing standardized status messaging based on where the user was in each process and what the next activities would be. Next a strategy was devised for how the global navigation (which was a part of the new system) would function when the user had entered an application contained in the old system.
Once the framework was finalized, I met with stakeholders to understand what data elements would be most useful to display in the pipeline table as well as whether features like search and filter would be desired and if so, how they’d like them to work.
Through presentation of design concepts and refinements during stakeholder working sessions I was able to refine the design to meet their needs. We also discussed how the design could continue to advance and how the simple pipeline view of their applications could be evolved to include additional features and functionality.
Results
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The consolidated design allows users to sign into a single instance and access all their apps from both the legacy and new systems.
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The design provides real-time application status & messaging at a glance; users no longer have to open an application (which took on average 30-45 seconds) and ascertain for themselves the status and next steps.
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The pipeline table groups and presents property owner contact information and embedded links that allow the user to initiate a call or trigger an email with a simple click.
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Data in the pipeline table is tailored to the user type; sales managers can see which of their sales reps are tied to each application and similar to the property owner contact information, a manager can initiate a call or email with a click.
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The pipeline table is mobile friendly allowing sales representatives to view their in-process applications when they’re in the field and may not have access to their computer.
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The pipeline page with updated data and controls provide a flexible foundation for future enhancements, including a user-customizable view of pipeline data and a robust project dashboard that will deliver reporting, filtered application lists, messaging and access to favorite selling tools & resources.
