Understanding the problem

Our goal was to find out why these issues were occurring. What was causing friction so these team members were struggling to do their job and struggling to do it without breaking compliance. Our team launched a series of 16 interviews with Loan Officers and LOAs from different organizations within our customer base, to better understand what was going on for our everyday users. We were able to speak with many people from all sizes of mortgage companies, and really get to know their pain points and their workflows. 

From Chaos to Clarity

After conducting these interviews, we used affinity diagramming to synthesize the data. Patterns and common issues began to emerge.

Key Findings:
‍
-There were two types of LOAs: licensed and unlicensed. Licensed LOAs were recognized under the law as LOs but were only closing their own loans occasionally. They mostly did all the backoffice work for the LO, while the LO was selling. 
‍
-Licensed LOAs often needed to manage multiple accounts, because their LO accounts didn’t give them access to do their LOA duties. While a regular LOA account didn’t let them participate in regulated actions like running credit. 

-Or, instead of having multiple accounts, the LO shared their credentials with their Licensed LOA which is a compliance nightmare.

-There was also a really big issue where users couldn’t see if one of their team members had taken action on the loan like sending an email, which resulted in the borrower getting sent multiple of the same emails or not getting sent an email at all.

-Each organization has its own way of assigning and managing loan workflows—some operate in a round-robin style, while others rely on assigning Loan Officer Assistants (LOAs) to work on specific parts of a loan. But beneath these different approaches, the problem was the same. 


This was more than a technical hiccup; it was causing real friction in their daily workflows and even led SimpleNexus to lose business to competitors who had a solution for this issue. From our research, we defined our problem:

Problem statement
‍
Loan team users must log in to others' accounts or manage multiple accounts with different permissions to access loans not assigned to them. This practice is illegal, poses security risks, and creates unnecessary effort for users. As a result, SimpleNexus has lost deals to competitors who offer solutions for this issue.

Use cases
‍
We came up with three use cases we could revisit to keep us focused on our priorities when we got off track in our discussions. They were:

-A loan officer going on vacation needs to be able to hand off their loans to a colleague and the colleague can easily assist borrowers using their own account.
‍
-Licensed LOAs need to be able to originate their own loans as well as manage almost all of the actions within the loan process from the LO they’re assigned to.
‍
-High-volume loan officers could delegate much of their workload to LOAs, knowing that the assistants could handle nearly everything. LOAs had the tools they needed to manage loans efficiently, all within their own accounts.

Building Solutions that Fit Seamlessly

With this in mind, I brainstormed an initial solution. We had thought about creating formal “loan teams,” where organizational admins could assign pipelines and specific roles to each team member. This would prevent the need for loan officers and LOAs to share credentials. However, as we mapped out this idea, it felt unnecessarily complex. Something didn’t sit right. Were we over engineering a solution that could be much simpler? I stepped back and reconsidered the problem. The goal wasn’t to create a brand-new team structure; loan officers and their assistants just needed better visibility and access.

Our breakthrough came when I took a good look at our existing portal and reframed: what if instead of formal teams, we simply gave loan officers access to other officers’ loan files and encouraged companies to treat licensed LOAs like mini loan officers, with full account access? I realized that we had gone into this project with a solution already semi-formed in our minds. But that solution wasn’t the simplest solution to our problem within our existing workflow. By enhancing permissions rather than creating new roles and team structures, we could address the problem without introducing much more complexity. And we could add some sort of activity log to help the users track loan actions taken by each user. With this clarity, we turned our focus toward building a solution that truly addressed our customers' needs without overwhelming them with new processes.

Permissions
The solution began with something simple but powerful: loan assignment permissions. We added the ability for Loan officers (and licensed LOAs) to be assigned to each others loans without needing to log in to someone else’s account. This alone addressed the bulk of the frustrations we heard during our interviews.

Activity log
But we didn’t stop there. Collaboration needed transparency, so we implemented an activity log. Now, any loan officer or LOA could see who had touched a loan and what changes were made. This made teamwork smoother and accountability clearer.

Loans table
‍Customizable loan views with the edit column feature were another key feature to make the loan assignment permissions work. Loan officers could edit the columns on their loan pages, adding a loan officer column, allowing them to easily track loans they were assigned to. This drag and drop behavior was a new component for the design system that I designed.

Notifications
We also built in notification controls—loan officers and licensed LOAs could choose what notifications they wanted. They didn’t need to be bombarded with updates for every loan they assisted with. Customizing notifications helped users stay focused on the loans that mattered most to them.

Use Cases revisited

These features directly addressed the real-world scenarios our customers faced every day:

A loan officer going on vacation could confidently hand off their loans to a colleague, knowing they wouldn’t need to share passwords. The colleague could pick up right where they left off, accessing and managing the loan files using their own account.

For licensed LOAs, they could now operate more independently. They were still assisting loan officers, but they also had the ability to originate and close their own loans without using their LO’s login and account or without juggling two accounts.

‍High-volume loan officers could delegate much of their workload to LOAs, knowing that the assistants could handle nearly everything. LOAs had the tools they needed to manage loans efficiently, all within their own accounts.

Testing, Learning, and Iterating

We development, we rolled out the new features to a select group of customers to test the waters. We watched closely as loan officers and LOAs began using the new permission structures, activity logs, and customizable notifications. The response was positive, but not without its challenges.

One loan officer noted that while the new permissions were great, the number of notifications they received quickly became overwhelming. We took that feedback and further refined the notification settings, giving users more control over what updates they wanted to receive, and allowing them to focus on the loans that truly needed their attention.

Another critical piece was the audit log. Customers appreciated being able to see who had worked on each loan, especially when dealing with compliance checks. But we weren’t tracking enough details on some of the actions that were being taken. It simply said, email sent and didn’t give any more description than that. We were able to go back and those details in, which gave users peace of mind knowing they could easily track activity without wading through complex workflows.

One concern that came up was that the performance of the loan assignment table had slowed down as we were now querying for more data. To mitigate this, the developers focused on backend optimizations that would ensure smooth performance even as customer usable increased.