Summary

Client: Landbay

Sector: Fintech

Challenge: Reengineer key dates page

My Role: Staff Product Designer

Overview

At Landbay, one of the most operationally critical pages inside the broker portal was the Key Dates page, a timeline-style experience used daily by underwriters, case managers, completions, operations, and support teams to track mortgage application milestones.

Over time, the page had become fragmented, visually outdated, and difficult to maintain. Different teams relied on different interpretations of dates, statuses, and priorities, creating confusion internally and externally.

As the Staff Product Designer leading the initiative, I was responsible for redesigning the experience end-to-end: aligning stakeholders, simplifying workflows, improving clarity for brokers, and creating a scalable framework for future case management experiences.

The Problem

The existing experience had evolved organically over several years. What started as a simple list of milestones had become:

Visually cluttered

Inconsistent across platforms

Non scalable

Source of operational friction between teams

The biggest issue was not just UI quality, it was the lack of shared understanding.

Different teams interpreted dates differently:

  • Operations prioritised processing milestones

  • Underwriting focused on compliance deadlines

  • Support teams used the page to troubleshoot delays

  • Product and engineering struggled with growing logic complexity

As a result:

  • Teams duplicated effort across communication channels

  • Internal terminology became inconsistent

  • Engineering complexity increased with every new feature

  • The page became one of the most complained-about areas of the portal

My role

Staff Product Designer

I led:

  • Discovery and UX strategy

  • Stakeholder alignment workshops

  • Service blueprinting

  • Information architecture redesign

  • UI redesign and design system alignment

  • Cross-functional collaboration with engineering and operations

  • Prototype testing with brokers

  • Rollout planning and adoption strategy

I worked closely with:

  • Product Managers

  • Frontend Engineers

  • Operations teams

  • Underwriters

  • Customer Support

‍

Objectives

We defined four clear goals:

  • Help users instantly understand:

    • What has happened

    • What is happening now

    • What action is needed next

  • Create a single shared language across teams.

  • Bring the page in line with the wider portal and design system.

  • Enable future products and workflows to plug into the same structure.

Discovery phase

I used the following research methods to gain insights

  • To align everyone, I facilitated a series of collaborative workshops focused on:

    • Mapping existing workflows

    • Identifying pain points

    • Defining business-critical milestones

    • Clarifying terminology

    • Understanding escalation paths

  • To understand the full impact of the existing experience, I conducted a series of shadowing sessions across Operations, Underwriting, Sales, Customer Support, and Business Development teams. Observing how each team interacted with case information revealed significant differences in workflows, terminology, and priorities.

    These sessions uncovered hidden pain points, duplicated effort, and communication gaps that were not visible through analytics alone, helping establish a shared understanding of the challenges and informing a more cohesive redesign.

  • To complement stakeholder interviews and shadowing sessions, I distributed surveys across all teams involved in the mortgage journey, including Operations, Underwriting, Sales, Customer Support, and Business Development. The surveys helped capture perspectives at scale, identify recurring pain points, and uncover areas of misalignment. This quantitative feedback provided valuable evidence to validate findings from qualitative research and helped prioritise opportunities for improvement.

Findings

“I don’t know what I’m waiting for.”

Users struggled to identify the current stage of the application.

“Everything looks equally important.”

The visual hierarchy was weak, making critical information hard to spot.

“Some dates don’t mean anything to me.”

Internal terminology leaked into the customer experience.

“I need to cross-reference emails to understand delays.”

The page lacked contextual guidance and status clarity.

Design Principles

I established four principles to guide decision-making:


1. Prioritise signal over noise

Reduce cognitive overload

2. Make status instantly understandable

Users should understand progress within seconds.

3. Reveal complexity progressively

Advanced operational detail should remain accessible without overwhelming users.

4. Build for operational consistency

The experience should reinforce shared terminology and workflows across teams.

The Redesign

Information Architecture

The original page contained long, inconsistent lists of dates and statuses.

I restructured the experience into:

Current Stage

A clear summary of where the case currently sits.

Key Milestones

A simplified chronological timeline focused on meaningful events.

Upcoming Actions

Clear next steps and dependencies.

Supporting Detail

Expandable operational information for edge cases and support use.

This dramatically improved scanability and reduced information overload.

Visual Design Improvements

The redesign introduced:

  • Stronger visual hierarchy

  • Simplified timeline components

  • Clear status indicators

  • Consistent spacing and typography

  • Better accessibility and contrast

  • Responsive behaviour across screen sizes

  • Alignment with the wider design system

The new experience felt calmer, clearer, and significantly more modern.

Cross-Team Alignment

One of the biggest successes of the project was operational alignment.

Rather than treating design as a layer applied at the end, I used the redesign process to standardise:

  • Terminology

  • Status logic

  • Milestone definitions

  • Escalation ownership

  • Communication expectations

This reduced ambiguity between teams and improved consistency across the business.

The project became as much about organisational design as interface design.

Prototyping & Testing

I created interactive prototypes and tested them with brokers and internal teams.

Key improvements from testing included:

  • Simplifying milestone labels further

  • Reducing the number of visible statuses

  • Highlighting blockers more clearly

  • Improving empty and edge states

  • Adding contextual guidance for delayed cases

The revised experience significantly improved task completion speed during usability testing.

Engineering Collaboration

Because the legacy page had accumulated years of technical debt, engineering collaboration was critical.

I worked closely with frontend engineers to:

  • Simplify component logic

  • Reduce conditional UI behaviour

  • Create reusable timeline components

  • Define scalable interaction patterns

  • Align implementation with the design system

This helped reduce future maintenance complexity while improving delivery confidence.

Outcome

Business Impact

Following launch:

  • Brokers reported improved clarity and confidence

  • Internal support queries related to case progress decreased

  • Teams aligned around shared milestone terminology

  • The page became easier to scale and maintain

  • The redesigned patterns informed wider portal improvements

The project also strengthened collaboration between Product, Operations, and Engineering by creating a shared understanding of the customer journey.

What I Learned

Great product design sometimes means reducing organisational chaos.

The most valuable part of this project was not the UI refresh itself.

It was creating alignment across teams that had slowly drifted apart in how they understood the experience.

As a Staff Product Designer, I learned the importance of:

  • Facilitating alignment, not just designing screens

  • Challenging operational assumptions

  • Simplifying complexity without removing capability

  • Designing systems that support both users and teams

Key Skills Demonstrated

  • UX Strategy

  • Service Design

  • Stakeholder Management

  • Systems Thinking

  • Information Architecture

  • Design Systems

  • Cross-functional Leadership

  • Workshop Facilitation

  • Product Thinking

  • Interaction Design

  • Prototyping & Testing

  • Operational Alignment

Final Reflection

This project demonstrated how design can act as a unifying force across an organisation.

By reframing a chaotic, outdated page into a clearer and more scalable experience, we improved not only usability for brokers, but also operational clarity internally.

The redesign transformed a fragmented workflow into a shared system that teams could trust, evolve, and build upon.

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