Wells Fargo

THE SITUATION

Wells Fargo’s mortgage business had spent about 12 years planning an upgrade to its lending policy reference materials. The content had fragmented so badly that nobody could tell which conflicting answer was correct. The tech platform was chosen, but the team disagreed on what form the app should take and which features it needed.

OUR CONTRIBUTION

With the project threatening to stall, the tech vendor (SDL) brought us in to break the stalemate. We insisted on watching the mortgage origination teams work, promising not to slow them down. Our ethnographic research surfaced things no one had put in the spotlight before. First, everyone had at least two monitors, sometimes three - so the app could own a full screen instead of a sidebar. Second, the teams worked closely together but held very different roles and experience levels. Some needed an answer fast, mid-phone call; others needed to weigh underwriting criteria carefully. Veterans knew how to get things done; new team members didn’t know where the best practices lived. Borrowing design principles from everyday consumer services like Amazon and Spotify, we helped design an app that felt less like an encyclopedia and more like a team coordination platform, where novices could learn from expert coworkers.

The BENEFITS

New insight and inspiration got the project moving again. A shared understanding of how the teams worked - and how their needs shifted by role and by situation - shaped a flexible, team-oriented platform. Wells Fargo still uses the Tridion platform today, even after RWS acquired SDL.