EXOS Inspect
Envisioning the future of property valuation
Problem
The existing house valuation and Inspection process is inevitable and time-consuming for a mortgage borrower, and it cames more and more risky due to the COVID-19.
Solution
The self-service house inspection app for mortgage borrower
Impact
Less than 20 Mins, save $60,000 per month, reduce turn time by up to 80%
Role
Lead product designer of the team, UX, UI, Visual Design, Prototyping2019.10 - 2020.5
During the 2019 Fall, the company has an initial idea on a consumer self-inspect product. When the pandemic was hitting the US, the project became one of the top priorities with a tight development schedule. I was part of this ambitious project to design the end-to-end experience for this innovation.
I led the design of the EXOS Inspect Mobile App between October 2019 and June 2020 and collaborated with another designer on the Login Screen, Video Recapture flow, Desktop Inspect Review Screen.
In addition, I worked alongside Design, Business, R&D, Marketing leaderships, a Marketing Lead, 10+ Developers, a Product Manager.
I stopped working on the project during the design for the future release phase as there are other priorities that came in.
The app launched in the US in June 2020.
Project Goal
Design and Build End-to-end product
Focus on MVP to initial market and future engagement
Exploring emerging technology to solve touch problems
Product Goals
The project's goal was to design a new, convenient, digitalized, self-served house inspection experience for mortgage borrowers, plus an alternative process for lenders to make an informed decision.
For the MVP, we focus on borrowers, particularly millennials, as they tend to own a house and apply for HELOC / home insurance within the next ten years.
Problem Statement
This existing house valuation and inspection process are inevitable and time-consuming for a mortgage borrower, and it becomes riskier due to the COVID-19.
Issues in Today’s Mortgage Lending Process
A process between Borrowers, Appraisers, Lenders
#1: When applying mortgages, a house appraisal service is a must and borrowers are paying a fortune for it
A full home appraisal is not cheap, it usually costs $500 or more, depends on the property size and conditions.
#2: Scheduling is time-consuming and painful for BOTH borrowers and appraisers
The Scheduling process is usally handle by a 3rd party company, they need to assign an appraiser and will attempt to reach the contact to schedule a mutually agreed upon time for the inspection appointment, it is very common to see the delay.
#3 In-person appointment increased the risk due the COVID-19, process often ignores borrower’s input
The traditional inspection process usually ignores borrower’s opinion, and the required in-person appointment has drastically raises red flag due to COVID-19.
#4 Appraisal Report delay by the Poor House Inspection Results
Appraiser can sometimes gather insufficient data leading to repeat visits to the borrower’s property and a delay for the report.
#5 Financial Decision delay by report and data validation process
Lenders makes decisions based on third-party data or a appraisal report conducted by 3rd party, they will need to validate the data after the report is considered gathering enough useful data, if not, it could delay the process.
Research Discovery
We knew these are the real problems for long-term business engagement with appraiser/borrowers/lenders and deep understanding of the property valuation process.
Survey Numbers
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.
Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.
Insights
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
“The inspection process is the key for the appraisal, and appraisers have their professional process to gather data, so it is not easy”
“Mortgage borrowers nowadays: embracing technology and learning domain knowledge”
“There are top data points that will increase house value for the most, but other kinds of data matters too”
“There are some new solutions out there, however, risk management, security, and fraud prevention has become the major concerns for mortgage lenders”
Reframing the problems
Market revealed the pain points and opportunities to enhance the borrower experience.
“Borrower engagement is key to minimizing appraisal risk, but how might we create a cost-effective and safer strategy for borrowers and lenders?”
This begged the question, how might we create a faster and better inspection process? Our proposal was EXOS Inspect, a quick, easy digital property inspection process.
How it works
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Core Product Strategy
EXOS Inspect is designed to be a module that could be embedded directly into the client’s App or its loan application process.
App Design Highlights
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Design Questions
Four primary questions informed my design strategy:
• The context that we need to consider
• How to make the workflow efficient and easy-to-use?
• How to design a white-labeled service to minimize the implementation effort?
• How to protect user’s privacy and mitigate data risk?
Delve into the User Context
First And Foremost, Where Are You? - Prevent Garbage In-Garbage Out
At the beginning of the entire experience, we need to educate the user that they have to be physically at the property address. Otherwise, the data is entirely invalid.
Geo-fence? GPS not enough so that you can report back to us
We use Geo-fence technology to avoid inspecting their friend’s property; GPS accuracy may vary based on the OS system. Therefore, a product design is made to fence an area and verify the user is in that area. If they don’t, an error state will be displayed to the user to prevent them from inspecting their friend’s house.
this state should be editable to minimize the mistake.
Design Exploration to Empathize with the User
In an earlier design exploration, I realized we might want to avoid putting users in a situation that might result in back and forth moving or create unnecessary UI transitions/steps that waste time and increase cognitive load.
“I Do Not Want To Revisit The Places I Have Been To.”
When considering the most effortless user flow, an important decision I made is that when a borrower visits each room to collect the data, they should observe in context and capture ALL the data. And there is no need for them to revisit the room. Similarly, it applies to the interior to the exterior path.
Visual Design Decisions to minimizes the implementation effort
Modularize the steps/questions, so it’s configurable by the clients.
• Combining EXOS Scheduling with EXOS Inspect to provide alternative options during the mortgage application process
BUSINESS NEED MET WITH THE IMPLEMENTATION APPROACH
The majority of the client’s Apps are based on the Native environment.
Continuing with the old implementation norm will comprise the
business opportunity, from the product strategy perspective, migrating
to a Native approach is crucial.
STANDARDIZED AND MODERNIZED NATIVE UI COMPONENTS
The standard UI components are considered to have the best
choice to work well with clients' App. And due to the tight
development schedule, choosing to use native UI components as
much as possible and avoid any customization is ideal.
VISUAL DESIGN CHOICE
The OS design language is likely to be the top 3 UI that user
familiar with most. The design decision to follow a native visual
design style will avoid style conflict between EXOS vs Client’s App
and save time and best support dynamic
An intuitive and easy-to-use workflow
Confirm video list first, move to Kitchen, record Kitchen, fill out room details questionnaire by observing the context, playback or proceed, move to the Living room and never revisit.
Speed Up Borrower's Workflow And Optimize Flow For App Developers
To create a faster workflow for the borrower, another product decision I made is that we don't let users wait. Simultaneously, the video will be processing, we allow them to proceed with the flow, and the video processing happens in a queue at the back-end.If there is an issue with the video, the user sees it in the final step. This design also optimizes the dev team's implementation scheme for video processing.
User Testing
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.
Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.
Mitigate the Data Risk and Protect the Privacy
Full Room Capture
Dynamic Instructions
Based on the percentage of each area of the room, a toast message will show on the top of the screen dynamically to guide the user to move.
Full Room Capture Progress Visualization
An experimental visualization for full room capture, user's movement will control the mobile icon with the Ncircle and paint the circle to provide direct feedback. A percentage is calculated of how much the room is being scanned. Our initial threshold is around 80%.
Result Page to Nudge User
Users are still able to submit the video that doesn't meet our standards. For these scenarios, we break them down based on the calculation metrics and display a confirmation page with an instruction to recapture the video with desired details.
Why Video?
Instead of taking three photos, a video contains thousands of images. It's ideal for capturing as much data as possible with video recording. The video streaming feature helps prevent fraud.
We also check the video duration to ensure a reasonable video length to balance the experience and data quality.
The most challenging part is how we protect users' privacy and verify a bedroom is a 'bedroom.'
In-App Room and Damage Verification
With machine learning and computer vision technology incorporated, we hope it could help prevent fraud.
QA: Video Resubmit Request
This interaction happens between the borrower and appraisers (or the QA team). As a final checker, the appraiser could send out a video resubmit the borrower's request to add more details about the property.
Our Commitment
The data is securely passed to the appraiser and/or lender and will be used to complete the valuation necessary for the desired home loan ONLY.
Dynamic Instructions
With sensitive data like religious symbols human faces, it can be blurred out to protect user’s privacy and avoid appraiser’s bias. It is based on an active iterated training model.
And this issue is being considered during the playback flow. If users see anything sensitive, they could retake and override the video, and it will permanently delete the previous video.
We might also put a tag on the timeline UI to notify the user that sensitive data are identified in the future phases.
Desktop View
Internal view for the appraiser to review/analyze, collect data for their report.
AVM Data vs Borrower Collected Data is designed to display in the same area for comparison.
• Auto Image-capture would smartly suggest four images from the video and it also allows users to capture images for their report.
• Could request the borrower to resubmit the video with a note.
- z pattern processing
Future Feature R&D
Starting on Mobile, but the data collected this way have risk, and the appraiser suggests that it should measure from the outside, so, there is constraint with the current AR measurement, we will need to rely on other emerging tech or LiDar technology for the mobile phone to make this happened
Instead, we focus on smart glasses like hololens. Generally, the borrower won’t have a device like this, but who knows the future, but for professionals, it could be an advanced all-in-one property data collection tools, and a future platform that connect with appraiser, lenders, and borrowers.
It could also be a training tool
Future way for lenders to review all the data.
The Vision
AR/VR/MR is in high growth, and 5G is coming, it is obvious that people will embrace these emerging technologies soon.
For this project and its MVP, we are focusing on borrowers, and particularly millennials, as they tend to own a house, and apply for HELOC / home insurance within the next 10 years.
For the future, we hope that everyone is able to conduct inspection using our products, which means not only borrowers could use this app to collect property data, but also videographers/ professional inspectors/junior appraisers could use it to handle their inspection work.
Launch
AR/VR/MR is in high growth, and 5G is coming, it is obvious that people will embrace these emerging technologies soon.
For this project and its MVP, we are focusing on borrowers, and particularly millennials, as they tend to own a house, and apply for HELOC / home insurance within the next 10 years.
For the future, we hope that everyone is able to conduct inspection using our products, which means not only borrowers could use this app to collect property data, but also videographers/ professional inspectors/junior appraisers could use it to handle their inspection work.
Numbers
Less than 20 Mins
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Save $60,000 per month
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Reduce turn time by up to 80%
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Explosure
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
[source]
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Reflection
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.
Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.