Escrow Transactions

After the project started, I decided to hold a service blueprint workshop so that I might better comprehend how everything worked from end to end from the finance team’s viewpoint. I began to form a few hypotheses and used them as guidance to determine what were the next steps. I needed to understand:

• “What happens when a new order is opened?”
• “What occurs at the end?”
• “What happens when something goes wrong, should anything go wrong?”
• “If something goes wrong, what are the steps for reconciliation?”
• “What does a successful fully funded order look like?”
• “Are there any other software(s)/App(s) being used outside of the platform?”

This exercise served as a check on our knowledge of the business. We were able to iterate our understanding of the business process. We started to uncover current inefficiencies by asking questions so that we could trace back an issue if one occurred.

(Fig. 1 — Collaborative Service Blueprint Exercise)

The workshop played a foundational piece that guided me to continue exploring ways to close gaps in my understanding. It was clear that the current flow and UI were performing suboptimal and weren’t up to standards with the industry. With a birds-eye view, it became easier to generate and test ideas to determine which of the changes had a positive impact on users without risk to the business.

I saw the need to create the ability to visualize multiple processes and their sequences of the proposed solution into a single document. Ultimately, it enabled us to have better conversations, efficiency increase, and proper documentation.

(Fig. 2 — Flowchart)

In most sessions, important details of an order were captured and stored on stickies on their desks. Accountants also used “alt + F” to search a transaction from a long list of running transactions. Another important insight I captured was the need for collaboration tools to streamline tasks, reminders, and comments.

(Fig. 3 — Observation sessions with the accounting team)

In a world of competing priorities, it made more sense to lean towards solving business needs due to the risks discovered. After a prioritization session, I began conducting a UX audit on the current UI. It allowed the team to see and iterate on broken processes which we’re confident would help inform future decisions.

The Real Estate Ops team had to manually input every incoming transaction and outgoing disbursement on a per-order basis. Much of this information was already captured in the platform. The input of the transactions was repetitive and left a lot of room for manual error. After an extensive interview with the Ops team, and funders both in NY and in TX, this was identified as the most urgent, important feature added to streamline workflows.

(Fig. 4 — UX Audit, Feature Roadmap Prioritization)

(Fig. 5 — UX Audits & Iterations)