For a week, we conducted several “design thinking” sessions with multiple stakeholders to better understand the pain points that users were having before they chose to abandon the application process. There were 4 major touch-points within the user experience that we wanted to capture: Before the user leaves, user leaving, user re-entry and after the user finishes the application. From there, we incorporated our quantitative research to better synthesize the traditional and modern methodologies used when creating online applications that meet customers needs.

The user’s pain points ranged from having an overwhelming amount of information to fill out to their ability to seamlessly re-enter the application process after initial abandonment. These pain points also revealed a deep level of disconnect between our products and our users. Storyboarding assisted us in walking through a variety of "pain-point" scenarios that the entire team could see. From there, we worked on incremental innovations that could help alleviate the frustration user's were experiencing.

We wanted to drastically decrease the cognitive load of our from applications and implement visual restraints that would improve the clarity and function of the overall design. Another goal was to also attract more millennials to our products, so leveraging our market research and insights on form optimization and form design was essential during the ideation phase.

In every conversation, there's a story. We wanted to leverage that idea and expand it into series of illustrations across all of our online applications. Finding a minimalistic style within the character development was essential when coupling it with the design of the online form.