Case Study
Revamping the Loan Payment Schedule
The Big Picture
Our UX team spent the majority of 2020 working on a massive overhaul of the customer account experience for one of our company’s consumer lending brands. Updating the entirety of the customer account had been kicking around the general to-do list for years due to the sheer scale of the project. This inevitably led to page-by-page upkeep as needed for functionality or legal changes.
The result: a confusing, disjointed, and frustrating customer experience.
Our Process
Team responsibilities I contributed to:
1. Researching payment schedule layouts from competitors and looking at how major banks (e.g. Chase) format credit card schedules
2. Figuring out what information customers wanted and then finding the best way to display that info
3. Collaborating with PMs on what payment information we could pull to display
a. This was key to figure out at the beginning — no sense in adding fields to only later on find out that we don’t have that functionality
My individual responsibilities:
1. Researching commonly-used payment schedule language
2. Replacing strictly financial terms used for the page title, category titles and tool tips to more self-explanatory language
3. Collaborating with PMs to see if the financial terms being used here were being used consistently across the account home experience and in any customer support scripting
4. Working with our legal and compliance team to avoid potential legal language issues
The UX researcher and UI designer began discussions on the layout and styling, and I worked on the page title and the category headers. My two main concerns were simplification and space.
“Transaction History & Future Scheduled Payments” didn’t exactly roll off the tongue, and when looking at it on our smallest device size, it took up the entire top half of the screen. But the PM made a good point that by including the disbursement amount and potential additional (and missed or failed) payments, this wasn’t strictly a set payment schedule.
I brainstormed a bunch of alternate titles, whittled down to the top contenders, and then ran those by my team and the PM to get their thoughts. I settled on “Your Full Payment Schedule” as the optimal choice. I wanted to make sure “Payment Schedule” was still in the title, since this is what customers were explicitly looking for. The added “Full” was meant to imply the additional activity.
For the category titles, I shortened the lengthy “Applied to Principal,” “Applied to Interest,” and “Applied to Fees,” to the more direct and shorter “Principal Paid,” “Interest Paid,” and “Fees Paid.”
The “Applied to X” title was a bit formal sounding and posed significant spacing problems for mobile. We knew the majority of customers would be viewing this on their phones, so even a one-character difference was huge.
Adjusting Information Hierarchy
Final Product
After three more rounds of iterations with our stakeholders and the legal and compliance team, we (finally) had our finished product.