Simple Nexus | Platform

Overview

Role: Senior Lead Designer

Outcomes: Increased ARR | Increased Customer Retention | $1.2B Valuation & Acquisition

The Product:

What started as a digital business card and calculator evolved into an industry leading platform that manages the entire home ownership journey for Home Buyers, Realtors, Loan Officers, Underwriters, and any third party involved in the “Home Buying Journey”.

The Problems:

For Users:

A lot of moving parts that slow down the home buying process
Time kills all deals
Frustrated Homebuyers mean lost business

For Simple Nexus:

Poor “Look and Feel” of our product was costing us millions in lost sales.
Usability was 30-50% of CS complaints
Fragmented and wasted development efforts due to no clear product vision to align and guide our decisions

The Goal

How might we streamline and take ownership of the entire home-buying journey so that we reduce frustration for homebuyers while saving loan officers and realtors significant time and money—ultimately becoming indispensable to our clients?

My Process

01. Heuristic Audit

I led a heuristic audit of the entire existing product to identify gaps in what we currently offered. We screen captured, annotated, printed, and displayed the entire product, gaps included, on the wall in the office for the entire company to see and discuss.

02. Overarching UX Vision

Through field research and interviews I mapped out the entire UX Journey for each of the core persona types and then validated and refined with internal stakeholders and external subject matter experts.

I identified where our current product fit into this new UX Vision and then prioritized key pain points that we could solve to expand the value of our product while not losing any of the value we already had. This optimized for speed and cohesion.

03. Leading from the front

I owned the core Loan Officer product, and took on the additional “Automated Underwriting” product as well as owned the strategy and creation of a new visual direction which involved creating a style guide to align with Marketing and a Component library to streamline development and keep designs cohesive across all emerging platforms.

I mentored our growing team of Jr. Designers hosting design reviews and strategy alignments to ensure they were able to confidently and effectively support their product team verticals while staying aligned with the UX Vision.

The new design system incorporated Apple HIG and Google Material guidelines and met all WCAG standards to enable accessible and adaptable design on iOS, Android, and Web to meet our growing needs.

04. Iterating & Updating

With the overarching UX vision to guide our roadmap and the design system in place to keep our visuals consistent and of a high quality. We were able to move quickly developing new features and updating the existing product.

I was responsible for the existing core product for Loan Officers as well as creating new “Automated Underwriting” tool that would drastically increase the speed of getting a loan approval.