A couple years prior..

‍As a newly hired UX Design Intern, I led the design of one of the company’s top priorities during the COVID-19 pandemic: its first fully digital closing portal. The platform generated $6.3M in annual recurring revenue (ARR), reduced loan closing times by 7.16 days, and was adopted by over 1,000 title and settlement partners. By reducing confusion, rework, and time lost to unclear next steps and document handoffs, the solution also saved $444 per loan while improving the experience for borrowers, lenders, and settlement partners.

The reality I walked into

Imagine inheriting a roadmap project that suddenly became mission-critical, with little margin for error. In early 2020, COVID accelerated the need for a reliable digital closing experience at SimpleNexus, but urgency alone wasn’t what made this work hard. I was one of four designers in a 200+ person company, embedded in a product team with limited prior access to design and an inconsistent design process. A v1 closing portal had just been release with low adoption. This v2 effort carried higher expectations: greater scale, stricter compliance considerations, and, for the first time, a fully branded, customer-facing product that needed to establish trust immediately. The challenge was designing a closing experience that reduced operational friction, inefficiency, and uncertainty while raising the bar for quality, ease of use, and confidence, within a low design-maturity environment and under real business risk if we got it wrong.

My approach

1. Shifting the Team Away from a Build-First Mindset
2. Improving the information architecture by make critical information scannable without overwhelming users
3. Saving users time when the happy path doesn’t happen

1. Shifting the Team Away from a Build-First Mindset

One of the most consequential challenges wasn’t just designing the product, it was changing how decisions were being made under pressure. The product team was operating in a scrappy, build-first mode: requests came in, features were built quickly, and design validation happened, if at all, after development was underway. Under normal circumstances this created inefficiency; under COVID-driven urgency, it introduced real business risk.As the sole designer on the project, I pushed to validate critical design directions earlier, not to slow the team down, but to reduce the risk of shipping a closing experience that failed to gain adoption. Engineering time was expensive, expectations were rising, and a misstep at launch could have undermined confidence in the product at a moment when reliability mattered most. The tradeoff wasn’t speed versus quality, it was speed versus the cost of getting it wrong.

‍Talking to our users:
To create a truly user-centered solution, I faced numerous hurdles in gathering user feedback and conducting research. This was the first time this team had had dedicated user research sessions that weren’t hoping on a call with a CSM. With our immature design team, we didn’t have many resources for research ops. I had to be scrappy; Zoom, Google Calendar and Google docs served as our technical toolkit and research repository. Using sticky notes, with my design coworkers and product manager, we mapped findings from out in an affinity map. I intentionally included my product manager in these standard design exercises, as I was trying to build a design culture into a product team where one hadn’t really existed before. I made sure to emphasize a few key points, and an area or two where we were going wrong, to prove the value of the intentional design research sessions we held.

‍Making Sure We Built the Right thing: I worked closely with my PM to reframe design validation to the team as a business safeguard rather than a design preference. By grounding conversations in adoption risk, wasted engineering effort, and downstream rework, we shifted away from building first, with a vague hope to iterate later. There was a pattern in this company design was constantly trying to push back on, of build version one then, learn a bunch from the release, have a big list of improvements for version two, then two years later never revisiting that product. That change allowed the team to move quickly and confidently, aligning execution speed with the level of judgment required for a high-stakes, customer-facing product.

2. Making critical information scannable without overwhelm

-The current file was hard to identify
-The current closing portal listed all the names of every single borrower on the loan, when really you were just needing to view the name to identify which file you were working on
-When you landed on the page, there wasn’t a clear indicator of what the next steps were, if you needed to do anything or if you were waiting on another person to complete their tasks.

I focused on surfacing clear signals to the user about package process, team member responsibility and next steps by:
-Surfacing only the primary borrower name
-Added a status and tasks column so users landed on this page and could easily see what was going on and what needed to be done next

Improved information hierarchy, surfacing only what was essential at each step while making deeper detail accessible when needed made the portal easier to navigate. The correct solution was showing the right information at the right moment.

3. Saving users time when the happy path doesn’t happen

The majority of title agents expect the loan lifecycle to be completed within 15–30 days, making conversion speed and reliability critical for mortgage businesses. The faster a loan closes, the more likely it is to close at all. With the existing portal, users were struggling to meet those timelines, not because they didn’t understand the process, but because inefficiencies compounded quickly when anything went wrong.

Research showed that 35% of title agents wanted reduced paperwork handling, and 33% preferred submitting documents only once instead of sorting through repetitive uploads. In practice, a single closing often required 15+ documents, typically requested multiple times. If even one document contained incorrect information, agents had to request an entirely new package. That resulted in multiple uploads with identical names, making it difficult to identify which version was correct and increasing the likelihood of mistakes slipping through.

When errors weren’t caught immediately, they caused days of delays, directly impacting close rates and revenue. The real cost wasn’t just user frustration—it was lost time, operational drag, and increased risk at the most time-sensitive stage of the loan lifecycle.

‍To address this, I focused on helping users recover quickly when the happy path broke:
-Created a version history that preserved all past documents and made it easy to identify the correct files
-Added clear error states so issues were surfaced immediately, not after downstream review
-Introduced mass upload capability to reduce repetitive, manual work

Together, these changes reduced rework, surfaced errors earlier, and helped loans move forward even when something went wrong—directly supporting faster closes and more reliable outcomes for both title agents and the business.

Outcomes

This project required designing under real constraints: rising urgency, limited design maturity, strict compliance requirements, and a workflow where small mistakes carried outsized consequences. I focused on improving the biggest pain points of the closing experience, where unclear progress, delayed error detection, or repetitive rework could stall loans and erode trust. The work centered on making the system more predictable and resilient, especially when things didn’t go as planned.

That focus translated into measurable outcomes. The closing portal generated $6.3M in annual recurring revenue, reduced loan timelines by 7.16 days on average, and delivered $444 in savings per loan by helping users identify issues earlier and recover faster. Preserving document history, surfacing errors immediately, and supporting bulk actions reduced rework and operational drag at the exact point where time and accuracy mattered most. The result was a closing experience that held up under pressure—supporting faster, more reliable outcomes for borrowers, lenders, and settlement partners in one of the most high-stakes moments of the loan lifecycle.

Testimonials

Mark Workens, CEO of Mortgage 1
A Michigan-based multi-state lender and early adopter of SimpleNexus eClosing, praised the solution, saying:
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"Hybrid closings enable Mortgage 1 to offer unbeatable safety and convenience by keeping physical closing appointments to a minimum and making loan closings available in the same branded app our customers use to search for a home, fill out a loan application, upload documents, and sign disclosures. We jumped at the opportunity to pilot this new SimpleNexus feature, and we are already closing loans faster and knocking the socks off of customers."

Others
"Love that we can present the 1003 for the LO to sign as well as part of the same Closing Package, this is a big problem in the industry."
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"Our title companies are going to love this. This cuts down on their time dramatically."

"We really like that borrowers can view documents ahead of time."

"The process was almost too simple. Other platforms for Settlement Agents can be confusing and we practically have to get certified to use it."

Conclusion

Throughout this project, it became evident that user research was the key to our success. By understanding the pain points of borrowers, title agents, and lenders, we were able to develop a solution that exceeded expectations. The secret sauce of our achievement was the unwavering commitment to creating a user-centered design that streamlined the mortgage closing process, providing convenience, efficiency, and cost savings for all parties involved.

As I reflect on this project, I am immensely proud of the results we achieved and the positive impact SimpleNexus eClosing has had on the industry. If given the opportunity to undertake this project again, I would emphasize the importance of early-stage user research and iterative design to further enhance the user experience. By continually listening to user feedback, we can ensure that our solutions remain at the forefront of innovation and continue to deliver unparalleled value in the mortgage industry.