Rural 1st is a sponsored brand of Farm Credit Mid America. They are a Rural lending institution focusing on lots, land, construction, and mortgage loans. Their unique value in the marketplace is the fact that they are embedded in rural communities and understand how to make loans with part-time, or full time farming income.
In my tenure at Rural 1st, I have led the design and functionality of many projects and features. At a large organization, design takes a unique shape and place in the ecosystem. Being embedded in the product team, I worked closely with Product Managers and Product owners to bring value for our users and customers. In this case study I’ll highlight a few projects and explain how our application development department works.
Due to the recency of the design and development of the features I've been working on (and my NDA) I am limited in what screenshots I can share of current design files and features.
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At our organization, we are currently in the process of adding value in our current legacy systems and completely redesigning our loan origination system from the ground up.
A loan origination system is the system that brings a loan all the way from the first touchpoint with the applicant to closing and booking.
This involves deeply understanding multiple roles and the value they bring to the loan journey. We have a large staff of Loan Officers, Loan Associates, Processors, Quality Control Specialist, Collateral Management Specialists, and Underwriters. All of those roles are users in the system and they each have unique goals and motivations.
The primary business vision that drives priority is our cost of origination. Currently, our loan journey spans across many systems. We have a separate Point of Sale tool, Sales Portal, Dashboard/Queue, Origination/Processing system, Document Storage, and Salesforce.
Inefficiencies in our user journeys, poor data management, lack of system feedback, and inflexibility makes our costs high since so many people have to struggle through the systems to get the loan through. In fact, it takes about 6-8 months to train a new employee in our systems even if they have prior banking/finance/underwriting experience.
To add to the mess, lending is an extraordinarily complex process. It is massively regulated, there are exceptions to every rule, and seemingly endless edge case scenarios. We often bend and flex to meet customers’ needs and that makes it a unique challenge to build a system around.
At the time I joined the company, there was not any source of truth for what our typical loan journey was. The information was known, but it was disparate and lived mostly in the heads of the people most senior (even that wasn’t comprehensive). We were in a situation where everybody had a piece of the puzzle, but the complexity wasn’t really understood.
To tackle this redesign, me and my teammate employed the Object Oriented User Experience model to break down the complexity. This framework takes a more objective breakdown of the system. Instead of starting with what people do, it instead maps out what the major objects are in the user’s mental model. After that, we can map out their relationship to each other, the attributes of each object, and the actions users can take on each object.
We facilitate a 10 day workshop with a selection of our users and business leaders and physically mapped out (on paper) every object, attribute, relationship, and actions in our system.
After this in person workshop, we fully digitized the output
From this workshop, we have operationalized the output in nearly everything else we’ve done. During this project our appdev department of 5 developer teams, the product team, and all our support teams, moved to a new method of delivering.
We organized our cycle into 8 week delivery increments with a 2 week hip-sprint at the end. This introduced new ceremonies like sequencing and WSJF (Weighted Shortest Job First), and formalized a lot of our discovery and design process across the department.
We no longer worked on projects, but worked on features and epics. We have used the outputs from that workshop to outline our roadmap, support the creation of our database, wireframe, prototype, lead deeper discovery into items needed to book a loan, and created process maps for the future state of how loans would be processed.
All of our differential processing
We also started doing twice-a-week discovery meetings with our business stakeholders. Our company’s decision making style is very consensus/democratically driven, so alignment upfront is crucial to the success of our design cycle.
In any given week I am creating wireframes/mocks to help explain ideas and gather consensus from stakeholders, then iterating based on their feedback, testing with prototypes, iterating based on user feedback, then preparing files for dev handoff.
We are currently in the process of preparing the first features for the LOS to be done in our next delivery increment.
Prototypes of our Loan Origination System. More screens are at the bottom of this case study.
While discovering and designing for our future systems, we are also designing features in our current systems. This has involved many different features and epics from bringing Optical Character Recognition to our customer financial documents, introducing new loan products, to surfacing more information to our partner lending organizations.
For current systems, the challenge and art of design comes in bringing new technology or functionality without introducing new design language. Design is about the user, not about me. So even if I may have qualms with the visual design of certain features, it provides a more intuitive and seamless user experience to speak the same design language while introducing new value.
I really liked the annotations feature Figma released last year. This is an example of surfacing more information to our partners.
This is a screenshot of the OCR work I designed.
In our efforts to raise the visual design bar across all our new system applications, our team is also responsible for our grassroots design system, Almanac.
Our design system team meets on a bi-weekly basis and we are using a custom material theme to build our own custom angular components.
When Figma had their major release of variables as well as styles, I led a total refactor of both our Figma design system and our development design system to start using a variable structure instead of a style structure. Our efforts with our design system have completely transformed how we develop new applications.
There have been multiple application reskins using our design system that did not have any UX resources allocated to them.
In all, my design efforts have led to many positive outcomes. My research and efforts to grow our research repository in Dovetail have led us to build the right thing.
I’ve helped lower our cost of origination from both sides of the same coin. In our current systems features I’ve designed have cut our document processing times significantly, removed communication inefficiencies for our partners, and have facilitated numerous business process changes that have all served our customers.
In our future systems, I’ve brought understanding to our delivery teams, created alignment with our stakeholders, and designed the future of our loan origination system. Throughout my time here I’ve learned just how much I can stretch and hold on my plate at any given time.
My communication skills have really grown as I’ve taken courses here on Communicating with Impact and Emotional Intelligence.
In particular, I’ve learned how to deal with conflict (both others and my own) and how important humility is in day to day interactions. The future for rural lending is bright!
