Introduction
The following Case Study was done as a design challenge and led me to my current (October 2021) full time Job as UX Designer at Anchor Loans. I had 4 hours to complete the design based on the following prompt:
Design a web based application dashboard that allows a sales person to manage their leads. The solution should account for the following lead content but feel free to get creative and add any additional features that a sales person might find useful. Required Lead Content: Lead Name, Lead Status (New, Potential, Interested, Has Deal, Submitted Deal), Lead Tiers (Potential, Interested). Use existing web capabilities, all technologies/suggestions must be viable for use today.
My Role
UX and UI Designer
Tools
Pen & Paper, Adobe XD
Deliverables
Desktop Mockup of a dashboard
Understanding the context and the user
Anchor Loans is the nation’s premier fix and flip lending company. They bring borrowers and investors together to create mutually beneficial opportunities for all three parties. Anchor Loans specializes in rehab properties. As a private money lender with extensive access to investment capital, their bridge financing through non-recourse loans helps thousands of individuals and companies quickly and profitably finance their fix and flip projects.
By gathering information through the official website (Our Account Executives) and job posts on the internet, and making assumptions based on my past work experience as a Sales Coordinator, I performed a quick analysis to understand the User of the Web App and ideate a proto persona.
The Sales Person needs to: convert prospects into customers, educate them about loans & adapt the loans to the borrower’s needs. They will also need to share their projections and speed up loan closings.
He/she knows how to use a PC for the basic functions and doesn’t love to waste time with intricate functions.
He/she is motivated and has passion for sales and people.
He/she wants a platform that gives instant access to all the information at a glance, fast and easy to use (e.g. drag and drop, click-to-call, filter by category)
Since not only the Sales Person will have to have access to the platform and be able to get quick updates on lead statuses, I imagined a Dashboard with all the numbers available at a glance (as well as a section on the Team status, to increase competition/motivation) and a more detailed «Overview» page to manage the leads.
The «Overview» page would consist of a list of items (each is a lead) with the main information visible (Name, Status, Tier). It would be easy to edit the statuses by clicking an edit icon or by dragging and dropping said item to the desired tab on the main navigation (on the left, following a pattern the Sales Person is familiar with: organizing files on a desktop), selecting multiple items at a time to increase efficiency. By clicking on an item, the details would open in a new section on the bottom of the page (without leaving the main page). From there, the Sales Person is able to edit the Lead details, send an e-mail, call directly, add a note, review details on the offer, see past activities. The items can be filtered through the navigation on the left and ordered by categories.
I then proceeded with the mock up in Adobe XD.
Final considerations
For the nature of the challenge and the limited amount of time at my disposal I designed mostly based on my personal assumptions and experience. To be able to produce a more precise design I would have needed a better understanding of the business, the actual data a client is asked for, what are the internal hierarchies, and a better knowledge of the User of the Web Application, the Sales Person (what is their day-to-day like, how much time would they spend on the Web App, and so on).
Among my deliverables you would find each and every page and function fully prototyped and I would polish the UI even more.
Finally, my next step would be to test my designs with the Sales Person(s) & the management through moderated user testing, and go back to iterate some more before the handover to the developers.
Nontheless, I found this challenge very interesting most of all because I had the chance to do what I would have loved to do in my time as a Sales Coordinator (I used Salesforce for years – and not a day went by without frustration on my side!).