SMS is all about speed to contact. When engaging potential borrowers, loan officers need to be able to quickly and reliably reach borrowers for a bevy of reasons such as: reminding them to return documents, sending back their credit score, and letting them know the status of their loans.
As millennial begin to purchase their first homes, the best way to reach them won't likely be a phone call. Millennials find phone calls time-consuming and inefficient.
There were many mortgage specific requirements that made this chat box unlike popular messaging apps such as Slack, or Skype. One of the more complicated requirement was that the conversations needed to be attributed to a specific loan application. All those different conversations (ex. borrower to loan officer, processor to real estate agent, broker to loan officer...) needed to be quickly view-able within the mortgage organization. Coming up with intuitive chat box design required many many prototypes.
There obviously needed to be a very visible way for a loan officer to be notified of new messages. We decided to mimic familiar designs as seen in iOS' messenger app to greater adoption and ease of use. This is early markerboard sketches of what it might have looked like.
Here's the live notification currently being used within the app. In earlier prototypes, the notification color was green. It was discovered that it made noticing a notification less likely as it blended in with other near by green objects. A 'warning' color of yellow was decided to pop against the cool tones of the app.
Here are some of the markerboard drawings that were presented to both the product owner and current loan officers to quickly iterate designs. The version to the left shows the option to change to different loan applications, meaning the app would only need one chatbox. It was decided that each loan application would have its own chatbox to prevent confusing users.
Here is the chat box's final mock up. It shows all the subtle gradients that give the messages a light dimensional appearance. Gray tones were carefully choose to either divide sections, and to control how much attention the element drew.
A borrower must send consent to text message prior to starting a conversation. We force loan officers to use the send consent tool to prevent loan officers from spamming their leads. An organization having to send consents is dependent on their privacy policy.
Here's how SMS appears within the app. Its currently being used by mortgage banks and hundreds of loan officers.