Handling documents during the mortgage application journey

At Acre, we had recently redesigned the client portal and needed to take a look how the document flow works. The flow needs to enable users to upload documents for themselves, or behalf of the person they’re applying for a mortgage with. There’s a list of documents that will be required, but users should also be able to upload any document.

As well as uploading documents, the users need to be able to view and manage those uploaded. Not only can the user upload documents, but the broker can as well, these documents also need to be able to be viewed & managed.

As you can see from the first paragraph of this case study, there's a lot of requirements to keep in mind when designing a document management flow for the mortgage journey. To ensure that each requirement is met, I sat down and listed each job that needs to be done by my solution. Looking at the above image, there were a lot.

We already have a design pattern for forms from the Fact Find flow in our Client Portal, however we did not yet have a file upload component. The types of files which the users would most commonly be uploading are more than likely going to have quite confusing names, pair this with us now allowing users to bulk upload files and it can start to get confusing for mortgage brokers to browse their clients uploaded documents. So, I set about designing a new component which would allow users to bulk upload files and easily rename them.

Now that the flow for uploading documents had been designed, I moved onto designing a simple document dashboard. Splitting the documents by who had uploaded them, and also allowing the user to filter means whoever is viewing their documents can easily see if there's any action required by themself.