Case Study: Application Portal
Imagine a federal loan application process—one that’s 22 stages long and takes a team of contractors months to complete, followed by an additional one-year waiting period to get results. That is the application process that our team at Fjord was tasked with redesigning.
We started the process by identifying and interviewing the 6 types of key stakeholders in the process and mapping out their user journeys. We fleshed out that research by speaking with subject matter experts with a high-level understanding of the entire application process.
Insights
We found several insights about the current state process:
1. Applicants don’t understand where they are in the process.
2. There is a lack of transparency around what is assigned to whom.
3. The existing application portal design is opaque and confusing.
Those insights drove our design process, and as the sole visual designer for the project, I was tasked with creating design solutions that would address them. Here are the top three:
1. A place to call home.
It’s easy to feel lost in such a long process. We knew that this was not a form that could be completed in one sitting, or two, or even ten. It was important to give the user a main dashboard that they could return to at any time—confident that their progress was saved. A high-level view of the people, process, and tasks yet to be completed.
2. A layered approach.
One of the clearest takeaways from user research was that the contractors filling out this application were being overwhelmed with information. Our proposed solution was to create layers of information that, wherever possible, hide all but the most relevant steps of the process.
When completing the initial interview section, users are guided through one question at a time.
The main body of the application is divided into sequential steps, which are then subdivided into accordion folders.
3. Progress at-a-glance.
How do we make it possible for users at all times to know exactly where they are in the application process, and what their progress is? That’s the problem we had in mind when we developed a hybrid navigation/progress bar.
In its collapsed view, it tells users what the main steps of the process are, and whether or not they are completed. In its expanded view, it gives a more detailed look at all the sub-steps of the main process, and more detailed information about their level of completion.
When implementation of this redesign is complete, users will be able to navigate the application process in less than half the time—resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars saved per application.