Case Study
Mobile App Development Project
Business Context
Freddie Mac’s ‘Innovation Lab' (iLab) decided to create a React Native-based mobile app with a desktop companion. The app was intended to support the company’s mission by enabling more effective collaboration between prospective borrowers and housing counselors with the goal of helping more borrowers qualify for a mortgage. Specifically, the vision was to create a way to securely provide credit, capacity and collateral data to housing counselors who in turn would provide a plan for improving their credit-worthiness and qualifying for local down-payment assistance programs.
Discovery
The team converged on the need for following capabilities to address the pain points identified, each requiring 3rd party service provider integration:
- Identify Verification
- Income & Asset Verification
- Credit Verification
To support this, I did research on the products offered by 3 vendors that the team selected as candidates to assess whether their product’s capabilities supported our use case. In collaboration with iLab tech leads, I also composed a medium term roadmap to prioritize proof-of-concepts for each vendor integration.
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Our work began with ethnographic research interviews with housing counselors and financial education NGOs to understand their work and pain points. We also conducted customer interviews with prospective borrowers to understand what impediments they saw to homeownership and gauge their interest in help qualifying as a borrower. The team collated information from these interviews onto a shared Miro board, allowing us to identify the following themes across interviews:
- EDUCATION | Qualifying for a mortgage seems out of reach for borrowers for whom it shouldn’t. Some also lack of awareness of local down payment assistance programs.
- ATTRITION | High attrition rate in the housing counselor/prospective borrower relationship.
- ACCESS TO RELIABLE/FRESH BORROWER DATA | Housing counselors generally use 'stated' information (especially for Assets & Income), which can provide an incorrect view of a prospective borrower’s creditworthiness or become outdated as the relationship progresses.
- HIGH-TOUCH UNDERWRITING | Housing counselors often use excel templates, paper, pen and calculators to get a snapshot of a borrower's financial life.
Design
This included weekly design working sessions to review and refine the latest UI designs, regular usability tests to understand how design updates were landing with users, and writing copy for assorted screens in the Asset, Income, Employment, Credit and Data Share workflows. We also coordinated with an assortment of stakeholders to incorporate feedback for various aspects of the app design:
- LEGAL | Worked with legal to remove copy that may pose a legal risk
- ANALYTICS & API TEAMS | Coordinated with analytics teams to inform them of soon-to-be available data (which may be used to create/enhance models or fed into risk assessment APIs for ‘decisioning’)
- ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE | Solicited high-level system architecture requirements to comply with internal architecture standards
- DATA GOVERNANCE | Provided documentation/metadata for all incoming data to comply with internal data standards
- MARKETING & COMMUNICATIONS | Coordinated to prioritize, plan and execute CMS integration to support the ‘Learn’ feature (a series of articles about credit and home buying).
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Design
✓ Successfully launched Alpha and Beta versions of the app and onboarded first customers
✓ Successfully introduced react native framework, mobile infrastructure, user analytics and crash reporting platforms, OCR-based identify verification and several other technologies to Freddie Mac
✓ Successfully introduced react native framework, mobile infrastructure, user analytics and crash reporting platforms, OCR-based identify verification and several other technologies to Freddie Mac
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