USAA | Skillern Sailer

USAA Mortgage

2016-2018

About This Project

I held a few different titles are USAA including Lead Member Feedback Analyst and Senior Experience Strategist. While neither of those titles are industry standard ones, what they meant was I was work as both a UX Designer and Researcher (initially in a Senior level role before I was promoted to Lead.)

While at USAA, I had the opportunity to work on a family of different products instead of staying laser focused on one specific project as I have in previous positions. This was a really great experience for me as a designer/researcher because it gave me a lot of opportunities to build on what I learned from my earliest Mortgage products to inform later design projects.

Early Research

My first assignment within USAA Mortgage was a "blue sky" redesign of the Mortgage homepage experience. The designs themselves are still proprietary, however I can show samples of my research.

The first research task I did for this project was a competitive analysis of other mortgage and financial sites. This was a really great starting point for this project because it's quick, cheap, and doesn't require a large team of researchers. Also, presenting competitors designs is a great way to solicit feedback from stakeholders.

My next step was to develop mortgage specific personas. More than anything else, this was a foundational document I kept returning to for each new product I worked on. These personas came from four main sources:

1) I sat in with Loan Officers and listened to live calls from members. In addition to getting the chance to hear members talking directly about pain points they were experiencing, this gave me a chance to talk with experienced Loan Officers and learn about their pain points as well.

2) I collected and curated publicly available real estate data. There are numerous reliable companies out there compiling data about who is buying houses, and it didn't make sense to spend our research budget doing redundant research.

2) I worked with business analysts to collect internal mortgage data to explore the unique needs and challenges for USAA members vs. the general public.

3) I worked with members of my team to conduct a series of interviews with recent homebuyers, asking them open-ended questions about their experiences.

4) I referenced previous member surveys and explored areas of overlap and contrast with the rest of the information I had collected.

The VA Loan Page

Compared to other projects I worked on at USAA, the VA page was one of my smaller projects with a shorter timeline. However, it was also one of the more personal projects for me as my husband and I had just gotten a VA loan to buy our house just a few months before. The goal of this page was to provide easily understood basic information about VA loans.

I'm a big believer in the mantra "You are not your user," so this project was more of a challenge for me as a UX researcher as I had to prioritize the feedback I got from real users over my own personal experience.

For this project, I worked with another Experience Strategist and a team of UI Designer/Developers, UI Producers, and Product Managers. My role focused primarily on research and strategy for the page.

In addition to the early research work I had done, myself and the other Experience Strategists conducted a focus group of some of our most experienced Loan Officers to inform the direction and content of the page. These Loan Officers had dozens of years of experience between them talking with our members every day, so we interviewed them as subject member experts. They were able to help of prioritize the most important information our members needed to know about VA Loans.

This page as since been redesigned as part of an overall marketing strategy change, however the content we created from this focus group was one of the areas that new design persevered.

Mortgage Digital Experience

In contrast, the Mortgage Digital Experience (aka MDX) was one of the largest projects I worked on for USAA, with my work on it lasting over year. I was brought on to lead the UX design and research portion of the project, working with a UI Designer and UI Producer. The extended team included DPOs, SMEs, PMs, executive stakeholders, and a large term of developers.

Initially, we were tasked with producing an initial MVP to hand off to developers within a few short weeks. We relied largely on the early research I had done on previous Mortgage products to inform our design. In addition, we tested with users as often as possible. For these tests, we created medium to high fidelity designs in Axure and Photoshop. The comps created in Photoshop we used to build clickable prototypes for Invision.

Whenever possible, we A/B tested our Invision prototypes in order to get feedback on contrasting potential design directions. Most of these tests were conducted through UserTesting.com, with our team reviewing the video results and integrating user feedback into our subsequent design iterations.

I've included an example of a couple design directions we A/B tested. One such design was a "text like" interaction where the user would fill out most of their mortgage application through a friendly chat-based UI. While as a team, we wanted to try novel design ideas, we were only going push the envelope so far without strong user feedback to support these designs. Ultimately, the user response to the chat-based UI wasn't particularly as strong as we wanted to see, so we chose the form based UI design seen in the current live version of the USAA digital mortgage application.