First American Ignite Schedule Notary
Navigating complex technical challenges, and providing a customer pleasing enterprise solution for a Fortune 500 company.
Project overview
First American’s Ignite Notary Scheduler is used to manage the scheduling and progress of the notary signing process. Escrow Officers (EO’s) must locate notaries to perform real estate closings and keep the process moving to meet mandated deadlines.
This project involved extremely complex business rules that can vary by state by state. Notaries can be internal employees, external contracted employees. Signings can be at a local FA branch, or they can be remote (RON). Each of these scenarios requires different business rules and UI to be responsive based on selection.
I worked with an amazing team doing weekly brainstorming and review sessions. The subject matter experts were 2 technical business managers, a scheduling manager, a project manager and a UXR.
What I did
Lead UX designer
Parter closely with research
Run team workshops
Iterate low-to-high fidelity mock ups
Created concepts using Sketch, Invision, Miro
Project research plan
Customer surveys (2)
Validate lo-fi design with user testing
Customer survey
Validate high fidelity mock ups
Design goal
Design a better way for Roxanne to seamlessly schedule signings so that, their branch can easier manage signing appointments.
Currently, most EOs use 4 different applications to manage scheduling. Follow ups and changes are done manually in multiple systems. It is currently a six step process.
Research details
Customer interviews
The project was highly collaborative, starting with customer interviews. Working with the UXR we crafted a script. Our goal was to learn about Roxanne's process, the "why" and the "when" of receiving notifications, and her biggest pain points.
First round total interviewed: 38. Break down: 32 Escrow Officers 3 Escrow Assistants, 3 Branch Managers from all across the US.
Key takeaways-features
Wanted communications from one-stop-shop i.e., Ignite
Preferred email over any other communication type, opportunity to also incorporate Ignite notifications
Wanted communications for External notaries and Remote on line Notary (RON)
No notification needed for internal signings if it’s reflected via status badges
Key events to trigger notifications
Notary confirmed
Changes to appointment, cancellations
Conducted 10 customer interviews
All parties should receive notification of the change
“I do not like that I have to put it in Ignite to see it on my dashboard. Then, I have to enter it into SnapDocs to get the notary assigned. Then, I have to put it on my Outlook calendar.”
“Too much back and forth to confirm the appointment.”
“I need to know as soon as the signing is done.”
Ideation phase
Team collab worksessions - understanding the journey
The team met on a weekly basis for activities and design review. I worked with the UXR to facilitate these sessions. Shown below: current system experience, Roxanne journey mapping, team sketching.
The team stepped through the current flow. Multiple systems and screens were needed to schedule a notary.
Empathy, journey mapping
Artifact from journey mapping activity board. We broke out Roxanne's process into task phases and what she might be "doing", "feeling" and our "opportunity.” This activity was conducted with the business team and had many time boxed activities.
Sketching and feature voting
Artifact from team sketching and voting exercise.
Design phase
Lo-fidelity mockups
The team opted to use low-fi wireframes to validate the UI elements and the various flows.
The intent here is to remove the cosmetic distractions and iterate quickly.
Wireframe artifacts for user testing.
Validate design with customers
Task based study-design validation
With the wireframes completed we ran our first round of customer testing.
This first round of testing was used to validate the design before diving deeper into more features.
Total interviewed: 7: 2 Senior Escrow Officers (EO), 3 EOs, 2 Escrow Assistants, 2 EOs previously interviewed. Time with FA: less than 1-28 year Geographic Span: AZ, CA, IL, IN, FL
The mocks needed to account for the different flows based on the user's selection.
The product owner contributed flow diagrams. There were six different flows to tackle.
I mapped the UI to 6 different flow charts based on the user’s selection.
What we learned
Expectations to sync calendars (out of scope)
5/7 liked that the travel fee was automatically added to the total fee. Want ability to override total fee and manually enter in a fee
7/7 liked the opportunity to directly edit appointment from confirmation page
Misc. Fees: For states that have misc. fees they prefer to have an option to enter in the fee and have it automatically added
Need ability to search for branches
Wanted ability to save favorite notaries
The internal notary flow was rated 4.3 out of 5.
The external notary flow was rate a 4.6 out of 5.
What we tested
Non-California users
Internal signing flow
Editing appointment
RON signing flow
External signing flow
California users
Internal signing flow
External signings flow
Editing appointment flow
UI would change based on the users selections.
Research survey #2 - communications
Survey
After the team validated the scheduling and fee functionalities, we had another round of research.
We sent out a 12 question survey to learn about communications.
Research question: To understand the type and frequency of notifications necessary to keep Roxanne
informed during the signing.
Survey type: Qualitative.
Total surveyed: 38: 32 EOs, 3 EAs, 3 Branch Mgrs. Geographic Span: AZ,CA,ID,FL,MI,MN,NV,OH, OR,TX,WA,WI,WY.
What we learned
Send notifications when the appointment is
Confirmed
Cancelled
Completed
Want a 24 hour notice if appointment is not scheduled or cancelled
How we got here
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66 Users
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35 Iteration feedback loops
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5 Rounds of UX research
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5 Sprints
Design solution
The Ignite product is a large enterprise application that is used to collect data.
It is very "form-centric."
Having a large number of inputs is often unavoidable, so my goal was to automate and reduce input as much as possible.
The new UI removes friction with autocomplete, branch and notary search, fee calculations and adding favorites.
Roxanne can search for and add preferred notaries to her list.
Roxanne can edit the appointment from here and receive important notifications.
Project challenges
The scope and well received features were scaled down due to timeline constraints and a reliance on an older system that is still in place. The business rules and fee calculations were very complex. I worked with the scheduling manager to translate the requirements into the design.
Outcome
The stakeholders were enthused with our work. The mocks were completed and ready for development.
Next: Tyler Courts
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