HashChing Broker App

HashChing is a Financial Technology startup based in Sydney. Three years old and offering the lowest competitive home loan rates from a network of 400+ brokers and panel of 80+ Lenders. HashChing has provided an online platform for mortgage brokers to advertise and share their own pe-negotiated home loan deals. With only a team of 13. HashChing has settled over $1 Billion home loans to date.

Tools

Sketch
Invision
Zeplin
Principle for Mac
Slack.

My Role & Team

I joined HashChing in August of 2017 as Product Designer. My team was CEO, CTO, Solutions Architect, Broker Manager and 5+ Developers. The project was started in January 2018 and launched in April 2018. 

Skills

UX Design
UI Design
Interaction
Copywriting

Deliverables

High fidelity mockups
User flows
Screen flows
wireframes
Interactive prototypes
User Interviews
Competitive analysis
Styleguide
UI Kit

Platforms

iOS
Android

Summary

HashChing Broker App is the easiest way for brokers to access to the HashChing broker dashboard and guide leads through the home loan application process. The app allows brokers to communicate and gather personal documents to ensure a smooth and easy experience. Cross platform app on iOS and Android.

Objective

HashChing provide a unique dashboard for brokers and this was only accessible via browser. An app was frequently requested by our broker client base as the constant logging in and only receiving notifications through email were a pain. So our objective was obvious, create an app version of the hashChing broker dashboard. 

Goals:

1. Make it a fast and easy experience managing leads

2. Give brokers more control and deeper engagement

Research

At HashChing we hold alot of events for our brokers to learn about the industry and how to get the most out HashChing products and they have been great in providing feedback and test our products at these events. This has allowed us to realise issues on the dashboard that we could serve on the app.

After a few catchups with the brokers these were our findings:

• 90% used iOS

• 70% managed thier account on thier phone

• 8% used a tablet

• Application status changing wasnt being utilised

• Finding leads was hard

• Hard to locate overdue leads

Planning

Brainstorming the app and keeping in mind a tight deadline and limited resource I had to limit the number of the features and keep things simple. 

Potential screens I can include on the first release and how they will link up.

Prioritising features

To ensure this release and its main functionality was prioritised I defined our main tasks and the ones that could wait.

Top Priority:

Lead List & Info

Lead status

Deal List & Info

Deal interaction (Toggle - Active & Disabled)

Profile

Profile Edit

Performance Stats

Leave Scheduling

Settings

Additional:

Notifications

Messaging

Adding your own leads

Settling a Loan

Messaging and remark interaction shortcuts

Wireframing

After sketching and some refining I worked out where and how the features link up I jumped onto Sketch to neaten things up for review. The process is fairly iterative in order to prevent wasting time and resources. Each user flow, wireframe and mockup required frequent communication between my client, the engineers and myself.

Finalising the High Fidelity & Handoff

Working closely with the CTO we made iterations based on feedback from the wireframes and Quick Invision prototypes. With the time running down and other projects in the line we had to quickly prepare for the next challenge….instructing an overseas development team to bring the app to life for a quick beta release.

Using Zeplin we offloaded the screens along with the app screen user flow as seen below. Originally the first flow was simple on the first release but with additional features such as adding your own loads and settlement forms were quite complex to explain so I created the flows as simple as i could. 

App micro actions

Micro-actions were created in ‘Principle’ to help with both testing and also to demonstrate to developers how each interaction animates.

This example shows the use of the new ‘quick actions’ feature on the main dashboard.

App Icon & other icons

Reflection

The beta release was a success, we released the app a week later with slight changes. As of today the usage of the app has reached 70%, not the number we are looking for but with the latest changes in our September release we are hoping to reach 90%. Designing the app from scratch helped to realise alot of the differences between iOS and Android with help from the CTO we quickly fixed these issues.