MarketInvoiceUnified Application Journey
MarketFinance had two legacy application journeys created in the past by different teams. Separate designs for different products were difficult to update and maintain. Commercially we needed to have more flexible application processes for services and for different customer types and partners.
The project was unexpectedly tested mid-development by Coronavirus – with MarketFinance’s accreditation as a CBILS supplier by the BBB.
The application form accomodates applications for different services; Invoice Finance, CBILS Loans & CBILS Revolving Credit from different customer types ( brokers / directors / employees / internal sales / referred customers).
Outcomes
- 8273 completed applications since late August 2020
- £1.55B requested funds
- Broker applications completed went from 70% - 96%
- Direct applications completed went from 30% - 67%
Processes...
1. Design Sprint
The team began by running a design sprint to identify the long-term goals and answer questions about the business' and customer needs.
A multi-disciplinary team ( product manager / engineer / designer ) collaborated over the course of a week with inputs from SME's from around the business.
We carried the outputs forward to inform product development.
Giving new and existing customers the most streamlined application experience based on funding complexity (product suite / limit requested / industry risk etc)
Should we focus more on broker based journeys and applications?
Do we ask or offer multiple products as part of the application process?
2. Axure Prototyping for stakeholder and customer research
Following the design sprint I created a wireframe prototype to test the new application journey with internal stakeholders and as part of a custome research exercise. It was a lo-visual-medium-interaction fidelity prototype of the multi-step application.
3. Customer Research
We conducted a customer survey on an indicative quote service (not shown here) and our proposed application journey.
We used an external agency for recruitement and Usability hub to gather qualitative and quantative feedback.
The outcomes were summarised in a presentation for external stakeholders. Key amongst the findings was uncertainty about connecting bank and accountancy accounts as part of the application journey.
4. Coronavirus - BBB, CBILS and how we integrated these mid-development
Mid-development Coronavirus landed and MarketFinance was approved as a CBILS provider by the British Business Bank. This meant we could receive and process applications from SME's for CBILS loans from the BBB. We'd designed the application to be modular and we were able to fork the application and also add in a CBILS eligibility page with a large number of inputs.
5. Visual design , Accessibility and a UI library
Visual designs were created in Sketch and shared with the engineering team via Zeplin. As part of this process we:
- Liaised with Marketing to more closely integrate with our marketing website
- Created a Sketch library that became a UI library in Storybook
- Designed all components and pages to be accessible (a requirement of our partners Barclays)
6. Feedback, Monitoring and Iterations
From launch the application journeys had an outgoing customer survey created using HotJar, which asked for feedback on ease of completion. Of ~300 respondents, ~75% described the forms as 'very easy' to use.
Recordings were also tagged with various criteria - user type / saved for later / etc allowing advanced filtering of recordings.
An in-house dashboard was developed for very close scrutiny and precipitating iteration of the forms based on stage drop-off / duration / more.
