Mortgage information architecture · Customer-facing stipulations after application submission
The question
How do you organize a large and changing set of loan requirements so a customer knows what to do next?
The work
Stipulations, or STIPs, are the documents and information a borrower must provide during loan origination. The overall catalog can contain roughly 1,400 possible requests. A given borrower sees only those relevant to their loan, but even a smaller set can be difficult to follow when items appear in no clear order, use unfamiliar terms, or seem to repeat.
I developed alternative ways to group those requests. Some began with the operating system: the risk of delay, the sequence of internal teams, or whether the customer, a third party, or an internal reviewer was responsible. Others began with a borrower's experience: familiarity, effort, time to produce a document, uncertainty, or sense of control.
I also reviewed the existing loan-origination interface against usability principles so a chosen model could fit the actual environment. Working with a lead product manager, I brought the alternatives to customer surveys and concept tests and to internal subject-matter experts.
The judgment
The strongest option organized tasks by time and process: what needed attention before internal review, and what would become relevant before a final decision. Within that sequence, customers could distinguish materials to view and acknowledge, initial documents to provide, and later requests arising as the loan progressed.
This was a deliberate choice among plausible models. A risk-first order could foreground potential blockers, and an ease-first order could build momentum. The selected chronology gave borrowers a practical sense of what was needed now and what might come later while remaining compatible with the process that produced the requests.
The aim was to make the work clearer, faster, and more reliable without pretending that the underlying requirements had disappeared.
The result
The selected model organized work by when a customer needed to respond in the origination process. A leading loan-origination platform provider replicated the research, validated the direction, and made the categorization available as an option for its customers.
Contribution and result
| Field | Account |
|---|---|
| My contribution | Generated the alternative models, reviewed the existing interface, and worked with Product on customer and expert evaluation. |
| Observable consequence | A process-based categorization selected; the platform provider replicated the research and offered the model as a product option. |
| Basis | My firsthand account of the research, selection, and provider response. |
| Boundary | This account does not report customer completion time, error reduction, uptake by the provider's clients, or an isolated business effect. |
What I carry forward
Information architecture can make a complicated service navigable when it respects both the person's immediate task and the system that creates it.
Project descriptions focus on my role and the contribution I can describe publicly. Confidential materials are omitted. Illustrations identified as reconstructions explain an idea; they are not original project deliverables.