Escrow Platform
When real estate is purchased, escrow officers work tirelessly to handle complex legal and financial logistics on tight deadlines. We designed a modern, user-friendly web app to improve escrow workflows at an enterprise level.
Discover
We created a persona and outlined high-level user flows based on stakeholder interviews and foundational user research, which we leveraged to hold feature strategy workshops where we collaborated on generating requirements as a team of product managers, business analysts, designers, and researchers. This collaboration allowed us to strike a balance between user and business needs.
Design, Test, and Iterate
We worked with the product team to plan which features to prioritize and execute for each design sprint. Depending on the scope, each sprint allotted 2-3 weeks to design and prototype initial concepts, followed by a week of usability testing, with 2-4 weeks dedicated to design refinements.
Dashboard
The dashboard was the central hub, where users would be able to access and customize functionality and data most important to them. Since our primary persona Roxanne the escrow officer was focused on completing tasks rather than analyzing data trends, I designed the dashboard to be more tactical than analytical. With the product team’s insight, we determined that data visualizations could live in a separate “Reports” page for managerial users in the future.
For our first round of testing, we probed into the user’s pain points around the current application, as well as two concepts we created that focused on surfacing task or file information. To our surprise, our testing revealed that users wanted to see a combination of both task and file information. This was because file information allowed them to see the status of their work at high level, while tasks allowed them to drill into specific actions they needed to immediately take.
I incorporated our insights and leveraged our design library to apply visual design efficiently.
Task Checklist
I also designed solutions for users to complete and track their tasks. During testing, users were enthusiastic that the contextual information we incorporated would increase their efficiency in completing tasks, task statuses, including notifications, notes, party contact information, and uploaded documents.
Search
When I designed the global file search, I implemented search categories to help users focus their search suggestions and identify their recent searches.
Since users only had a slight preference for categorized search results, I created a toggle they could click to uncategorize their search results.
I also designed around scenarios where the search query had no results, but similar search queries had results, to provide guidance for the user when possible.
Develop
Throughout the project, we worked closely with developers to ensure feasibility of designs, we leveraged patterns from Material Design where possible to increase efficiency in development. We also provided an online design management system and annotated prototypes for reference. Every time developers completed their tickets, we provided QA feedback on visual and interaction design execution.
Outcome
After proving immense value to the client, they extended our engagement an additional 9 months and started an internal product design team of 5 to continue delivering high quality evidence-driven design.