United Wholesale Mortgage (UWM) Internship Project
Summary
As part of my UX Design internship at United Wholesale Mortgage (UWM), my partner and I redesigned the application that IT coaches within the Center of Excellence (CoE) use to measure the maturity of development teams in relation to Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) standards set by the industry and UWM. We researched the experience for teams completing assessments and how coaches communicate with teams. I collaborated with the UX research team, UX design team, UX writing team, the product owner, and other stakeholders to create a high fidelity prototype that supports teams completing assessments, receiving coach feedback, and viewing progress metrics. The redesigned application will lead to increased support for development teams to align with SDLC standards, resulting in more cost-effective and time-efficient development.
Role
UX Researcher, UX Designer
Methods & Tools
Methods: Content Inventory + Audit, User Interviews, Observations, Affinity Diagramming, User Flows, Wireframing, Prototyping
Tools: Figma, FigJam
Process Overview
Empathize
Define
Ideate
Prototype
Test
Introduction
Background on the Center of Excellence (CoE)
The Center of Excellence (CoE) is an organization within United Wholesale Mortgage that “promotes quality-driven solutions and outcomes through team empowerment, continuous improvement, and standard practices.” They aim to help IT teams better adhere to industry and UWM standards for development in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) so that teams can develop via more cost-effective and time-efficient methods.
IT teams complete assessments on the CoE page to determine their maturity by providing relevant evidence. Assessments are broken up into 5 practices, including Architecture, DevOps, Product Delivery, Quality, and Development. CoE coaches for each practice then provide feedback and aid teams according to develop better practices.
Objective
As the team developed the initial site very quickly, they did not collaborate with the UX team nor implemented UX best practices, resulting in teams completing assessments having difficulty and feeling like a cumbersome task.
For the duration of our internship, my partner and I were tasked with redesigning the Assessments and SDLC Roles pages. We incorporated UX considerations, as well as aimed to improve the communication gap between teams and coaches. Lastly, our design should utilize the new company design system, Dream, to align with other products.
Current State
Final Deliverables
Design Process
Full design process coming soon!
Conclusion
Over the course of this project, I collaborated with many team members, including researchers, designers, and stakeholders to redesign the CoE application for teams to complete assessments to measure their maturity for SDLC standards. This new design will allow teams to efficiently complete assessments, receive coaching feedback, and improve their development practices. In turn, the development teams at UWM can be more cost-effective and time-efficient while also reducing risk.
If there was more time available…
Further Usability Testing
Building a testing plan and conducting formal usability testing would have allowed to gather more robust user feedback
Design Remaining Pages
There are still multiple pages left for the site, implemented them would have created a more comprehensive redesign.
Dark Mode
Users during testing noted the desire for a dark mode, so implementing a dark mode alongside the light mode would allow for greater user satisfaction.
Lessons Learned
Balancing User + Stakeholder Needs
Building a testing plan and conducting formal usability testing would have allowed to gather more robust user feedback.
Larger Participant Pool
Given the diversity of project and IT teams, there are many perspectives to how they use the CoE site. To gain better understanding of the user, I think it would have been beneficial to recruit more participants from a wider variety of teams.
Change is Constant
Throughout the process, expectations and requirements constantly changed. I had to keep an Agile mindset and embrace the changes as they came.
The Last 10% Takes the Longest
Throughout the process of refining my high fidelity designs, I often thought of new user states and edge cases, so I would have to think about how those would work with the designs.