Nationale-Nederlanden is a top mortgage providers in The Netherlands. They are known for their unmatched customer service level. Bringing this custom-centric approach to NN's digital platforms proved to be a huge undertaking that required involvement from lots of internal and external stakeholders. Keep reading to learn why.

Timeline: 12 months

Team: 1 product owner, 1 product designer, 1 UX researcher, 1 customer journey specialist, 5 developers

Deliverables: a brand new mortgage application tracking platform for customers and independent advisors

You may wonder, what made this initiative so complex? A few aspects are worth noting:

Mortgage applications always involve various parties: the customer looking to buy a home, an independent mortgage advisor and the financial institution. Each party has very different needs at every stage of the mortgage application process.

Mortgages are highly complex financial products with many product variations and conditions. Explaining these differences and conditions is key to delivering a successful end-to-end experience for the customer and advisor.

Independent advisors play a critical role in the mortgage application process. The new portal aimed to make their job easier, not to replace it or to cause confusion with customers by providing information out of context.

With these considerations in mind, involving customers and stakeholders formed a critical aspect to make this effort a success. Therefore, we hosted customer interviews, performed usability tests and organized department-wide review sessions. Insights from all these efforts were applied in various stages of the design process, creating a continuous cycle of research, ideation and design.

Through research insights we concluded that we could best cater to the needs of customer and advisors by delivering not one but two solutions;

An application process tracking platform for customers that was designed mobile-first and provided brief status updates.

An customer dashboard that provided insight into all running applications an advisor may have, designed for larger screen sizes and focussing on task-oriented workflows that support the work of the advisor.

Considering their different needs, implementing different solutions proved to be the best way to serve these user groups. Nevertheless; the interplay of the information delivered through each of the platforms remained key. Eventually, both platforms supported the overall process by providing the right information to the right person at the right time.

It became clear to the team that it was critical to be able to inspect each screen with any combination of product characteristics and application process stages. Therefore, we designed a fully interactive prototype that rendered all of these variants. A simple navigator allowed anyone to browse the various stages of the application process for various types of mortgages. An overview for the customer variant can be seen below:

Through this process of research and design we eventually designed a solution for customers that displayed the entire mortgage application process in four simple steps. Each step explains what to do next, which parties are involved and provides clear overviews of deadlines. Some of the screens can be seen below:

For advisors on the other hand, we designed a task-oriented overview for each mortgage application. Rather than explaining the process, we focus on clearly displaying task and status information.

After an extensive testing phase, the platform was launched among customers and advisors. It resulted in a more efficient workflow for advisors and more peace of mind for customers. An overview of the customer-oriented platform is given in the video below: