The product
Eureka worked with UFCU to refine and implement newly minted visual design strategy as well as a next generation technical architecture to support their expanding consumer lending needs. The new product was more comprehensive and streamlined than the previous generation system, and it was designed to deeply integrate with internal Omni Channel lending processes. At launch, the product was intentionally servicing a limited segment of the auto loan market with the goal of establishing internal best practices for analyzing consumer behavior and using feedback to drive future iterations of the product. Since the initial release, additional consumer lending products are being constantly added to the platform as it evolves to service an ever broader segment of UFCU’s lending business.
Design and strategy
With a working user experience and visual design in-hand, UFCU had made considerable progress developing the consumer facing aspects of the product. However, much of that work had occurred largely devoid of engineering input and validation against real world technical and process constraints. Eureka quickly identified these gaps, tightened up relevant use cases, updated user experience models, and proposed an application and engineering process design that could accommodate the iterative design strategy needed to support the project. We went to work, and by the end of this process we had a living style guide, a viable technical architecture, a baseline library of components that we could use for rapid development and experimentation, and a fully functional toolchain and deployment pipeline to support our ability to do so. Since a key element of the design strategy was to start small, test, and iterate using real world data and user feedback, we paid particular attention to instrumentation, monitoring, analytics, and operational reporting. With this approach, we were able to design and develop our processes around constant change, early detection of issues and successful execution of the design strategy.
Complex integrations
Ever wonder why it can take so long to get a loan approval? Well, as it turns out, lending is a complex beast. Throughout this project, Eureka worked closely with numerous business stakeholders to comprehensively identify legacy systems and processes that would be impacted with the introduction of the new lending platform. We worked to design and implement the necessary integration and process changes including developing plans for gradually phasing in the new technology and engineering processes with best practices implementation, agile project management, release management, code versioning, developer workflows continuous integration, automated deployment, rollback, and complex multi environment testing.
The consumer facing lending platform was launched in a record four month timeframe, and after several more iterations under Eureka’s mentorship, UFCU’s internal product team was operating smoothly and efficiently, carrying the project forward.
Services
- Product strategy and planning
- User experience and visual design
- Engineering process improvement
- Software design and development
- Systems integration
- Project management
