Featured Project
Fannie Mae Connect
Fannie Mae launched Connect with the goal of empowering its business partners through data. My team helped Fannie Mae envision a Connect that intelligently supports decision making, not overwhelming users with “mountains of unactionable information”.
Goals
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Understand Fannie Mae business partners’ information needs beyond their current pain points
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Create an experience strategy to position Connect as a product that addresses those needs exceptionally well
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Align siloed business units on the future vision for Connect
Team and Responsibilities
Team Makeup
- 3 Product Owners
- 4 Product Managers
- User Experience Lead (me)
- 2 UX Designers
My Responsibilities
- Conducted stakeholder interviews to define and align on business objectives
- Conducted user research to understand customer goals, roles, needs, and motivations
- Facilitated a vision workshop to presenting findings and align stakeholders on a future-state vision
- Created personas, customer journey maps, and initial conceptual designs
User Research
Journey Mapping
Data Visualization
Strategy
Challenge
Fannie Mae’s business units were siloed and their lack of a cohesive vision led to a great concept turning into a confusing mountain of data. Fannie brought us in to envision the future vision for Connect and align stakeholders around a better understand their users’ needs beyond pain points with the existing portal.
Turning Confusion into Confidence
My team helped set the vision to transform Fannie Mae Connect from a web-based data portal into a data-driven enablement and decisioning platform.
Discovery
Customer Interviews
Working with a pair of product managers, my experience team conducted 31 interviews with:
- 9 stakeholders and SMEs
- 15 customer support representatives
- 17 external users
The external users fell within four known user segments, and our research introduced an additional segment representing Field Service and Repair Vendors.
Loan Lifecycle
Through our research, we identified touch points of critical importance within the loan lifecycle that were ripe for innovation.
Vision Workshop
Workshop Ideation
To align the various business units, I planned and facilitated an off-site vision workshop where my team and I presented the findings from our research.
The attendees broke out into ideation groups, each led by a member of the experience team, to generate bold ideas for the future of Fannie Mae Connect.
Key Insights
During the workshop, I provided a high-level summary of key insights uncovered during the discovery process.
These key insights served as a framework and home base for all other workshop activities.
Vision Statement
Using Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle as a framework, the group aligned on a new vision statement:
We provide insights to our industry partners, empowering them to serve their mission and enable the dream of homeownership.
Design
Future-State Journey
After the workshop, my team went heads down pouring through the discovery insights and the ideas generated during the workshop.
Using the loan lifecycle as a foundation, we drafted a future-state journey map to showing how those critical friction areas could be turned into moments of delight.
The New Fannie Mae Connect
Future-state Storyboard
To tell the full story of the future-state vision for Fannie Mae Connect, I created an illustrated storyboard that shows key interactions at each major step along the user journey. These are some of those storyboard images.
