Breaking Design Gridlock

The Wells Fargo home lending group was redesigning its policies and procedures reference tool, to make the loan origination process more efficient and more compliant. The problem was, different internal teams had conflicting perspectives on how to design the tool. Where should the information reside, how should it be organized, and how should it be delivered? These disagreements were stalling the process and threatening to underleverage their new content management system, so the CMS platform vendor brought us in to provide empathy and clarity.

Although the tool was for employees only, and they had an advisory group of super-users, we felt we needed to see how regular employees worked. We went to their workplace, careful not to disturb daily operations, to watch people working and ask them about their process.

What we learned was that the loan origination process was not a linear journey from employee to employee, role to role - it was addressed by a team, together. This meant that the tool needed to be less of a personal, role-based reference site, and more like a team facilitation platform. This changed feature prioritization significantly. We also discovered that team members had plenty of screen space, so we could design a more robust, spacious interface. We developed interaction models and feature recommendations.

Now, the internal IT team and the CMS platform vendor can build not just a reference site, but a teamwork environment that empowers entire loan origination teams.