Broker Portal, Salesforce Communities

Role: Director of Product Design

Problem: Brokers submit applications on behalf of small business owners. Currently this is done through an online application that does not connect to our Salesforce CRM platform. Brokers do not have a way to track the status of their submitted app and rely very heavily on manual intervention from our account managers. The process causes numerous areas of inefficiencies for Brokers and Funding Circle's internal loan processing team.

Solution: Create a Broker self service platform in Salesforce Community platform.

Why: Consolidate application process into an existing platform. Loan operations teams were already familiar with Salesforce tool therefore training would be seamless. The process allowed automation and CRM integration therefore processing would be faster.

Success: Salesforce communities allowed for UI customization therefore the Funding Circle brand could be applied. Because we were using existing component libraries very little engineering support was needed. A plug and play solution.

Design Process

User Research

Qualitative, The product manager and myself shadowed and interviewed the broker’s process.

Quantitative, a survey (via Survey Monkey) was also distributed to 10 active brokers to collect defined variables.

Wireframes

Since we were using existing components provided by Salesforce, design went into wireframes very quickly.

User feedback

Remote user testing will be conducted via Validately. Users provided validation on content hierarchy and were able to conduct their task with very little friction. Another round of testing will be conducted once visual design is finalized and a beta is built on the Salesforce Community environment.

Visual Design

Salesforce components allowed us to apply our brand but with limitations. Collaborated with engineers to identify what user interactions will be compromised. For example, a second tier navigation component did not exist therefore we were forced to use a drop down select input field. It was not the most elegant solution but results of usability testing didn’t show any friction for users to complete their task.

Visual Design below is work in progress.