Lloyds Banking Group.

My mission

I was brought in to upgrade the user interface for mortgage product transfers performed by brokers. However, after a short period of time on the project I was able to shape the direction of the project to be more user led.

As the designer for the mortgage broker journeys project, I was responsible for service, user experience, and user interface design within a team that had limited design knowledge. The team consisted of a Product Owner, Scrum Master, Analysts, and Developers. As the sole designer, I collaborated with the product team to fulfill business-led requirements.

Roles and Responsibilities

While focusing on the broker product transfer journey, I sought opportunities to enhance the overall flow and service. I modernized the existing system, making it responsive and user-friendly, with the primary goal of reducing manual data entry for brokers. We launched an improved version as a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and I developed new concepts for quick quotes, a service blueprint, documentation, and designs for several additional increments for the team to implement.

Initially tasked with modernizing, rebranding, and making the existing journey responsive, I began by researching the mortgage broker and banking domains. After onboarding and conducting due diligence, I discovered that the team's request did not fully align with user needs. I therefore approached the project from two perspectives:

• Deliver the team's request (rebranding, modernization, responsiveness)
• Investigate, map out pain points and assumptions, ideate, and design potential enhancements

This dual approach led me to take on additional responsibilities, including:

• Conducting research
• Creating a service blueprint
• Redefining journeys, flows, and features
• Determining scope within the broader broker system
• Identifying usability pain points
• Generating ideas for solutions
• Sharing knowledge about Design Thinking with Lloyds staff
• Rationalizing and presenting work to non-design stakeholders

By developing the service blueprint and highlighting pain points, I was able to document assumptions and hypotheses for ideation. Some of the concepts generated included:

• Quick quote tool
• Broker dashboard

Product transfers

Service blueprint

I did a deep dive into the broker platform, investigating the steps that brokers follow the information that they need and have and processes that they follow. I created a service blue print that outlined:

• Steps and stages
• Relationships and stakeholder involvement
• Communication methods
• Data requirements
• Timings
• Legalities
• Pain points
• Tooling

To achieve this I worked with SMEs at the bank who had vast domain knowledge of the intermediaries space as well as mortgage brokers in the local area. The research I conducted was able to validate my concerns and highlighted many areas for improvement of the process of product transfers.

Quick quote concept

I mapped key pain points onto the journey and created a variety of hypotheses that suggested how we may help brokers overcome their daily issues. One such hypothesis was:

I can see... brokers have to do lots of manual calculations.
I believe that... brokers would benefit from being able to use a product that did all of the calculations for them.
This will help with... complex mortgages that have multiple sub accounts and products.

For this I produced a quick quote concept tool for managing complex mortgage accounts without any hassle.

Broker dashboard

Whilst on this team I mapped key pain points onto the journey wider than initial scope was allowed for, this provided me the opportunity to provide consistent designs for pages at earlier stages of the service blueprint.