The Problem
The usage of LendingTree’s Canopy platform was primarily focused on internal users who would receive requests from lenders and work with them to update specific lender or loan campaign information. This usage had caused the platform to become optimized to these internal stakeholders needs so that they could quickly and “efficiently” solve the lender’s needs. With the product team wanting to give more control of this platform to its lender users, a redesign was needed to ensure ease of use and understanding while also updating structural and informational hierarchy.
The Process
As the lead interaction designer for this project, I first wanted to gather all of the details about this platform and its current usage. After doing a deep-dive into the current information hierarchy, I started to find opportunity areas. This included slight reorganizations of interactions and information on different pages as well as certain data visualizations to show users depending on where the user was. In addition, I also wanted to be sure to streamline the creation and management of campaigns for the user. Some of the original layouts can be seen below.
After presenting these initial ideas out to the team, it was decided that this reorganization could move forward. Looking at each page, I wanted to structure the layout in such a way where the top level pages would showcase relevant information to the user. The top of most pages would consist of relevant data visualizations that would inform the user of current performance and alert them to any anomalies with their current campaigns, their pricing, or their capacity. In addition, I also wanted to be sure that each campaign also had its own page that could also be analyzed for potential improvements in these metrics. By having these campaigns as separate pages, it allowed them to be linked throughout the UI for quick access, including from the capacity and pricing screens. Some of these initial designs can be seen below.
Another issue that was discovered was the current user management of the platform. After some initial digging, I discovered that the user to lender pairing was one-to-one. This meant that any user had to create a unique email for each lender. I inquired whether it was possible for users to have access to multiple lenders which I was told there was. The way the current system handled this was to have these users create separate emails depending on which lender account they needed to access, creating multiple email addresses for the same user. After discussion with the product manager, I was able to convince the team that this was not a scalable solution and that a user should be able to be to login using a single email address and choose which lender they would access. This shift in user management created the need for lender users to login and select which lender they would like to access and start to edit. The designs below showcase these initial lender selection screens.
The Solution
The final design touched on all areas of the Canopy platform. A new login process was built to closely resemble the rest of LendingTree’s platforms and give outside users better control of resetting their password. After logging in, any user who is assigned to multiple lenders will have an option to select which lender they would like to access. Once selected, the user is then taken to the campaigns section of that lender. The dashboard area and metrics UI on campaigns were descoped from the initial release based on time and engineering constraints. From here, the user can edit or add new campaigns, change the pricing and capacity of campaigns, and edit the permissions of users connected to the lender (permission based). Below are some of the final designs that were delivered for implementation.