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I value creativity, craft, and collaboration. The more the design team leans into these Cs, the more it can make a tangible difference in both people and product. I'm lucky to influence conversations and practices that prioritize these elements at SimpleNexus.

### **Contributions**

**Group Design Lead for the Admin-Closer Group:**

* I collaborate with Group PM Bryan Manwaring and Engineering Manager Jay Harvey to support health, effectiveness, and strategy for 3 teams. What a pleasure to work with people who care.

* I help lead product vision, strategy, and discovery by facilitating cross-team collaboration and workshops then documenting progress for cross-organization storytelling.

**Mentor to designers and non-designers:** I teach interaction design, product and systems thinking to designers. I teach non-designers design principles and design's role in products, teams, and organizations.

**Facilitating regular dialogue and workshops:**

* Started and host a weekly discourse meeting so our team could develop a united front to the rest of the org. We align on design system patterns, philosophy, and horizontal problems.

* I design workshop and documentation templates to empower designers to lead strategy on their teams.

* Guided designers through a multi-day workshop that focused on mapping the full company experience. This got designers thinking bigger on impact, dependencies, and how to collaborate towards consistent, cohesive design.

### **Outcomes**

The design team makes regular progress on how we think and apply design in a unifying way. Our proactive stance allows us to build more trust and respect with our partners, having more weight at the strategy table while smoothing collaboration. Pushing towards these values helps our team mature and make a greater impact in people and product.

Another important outcome is the camaraderie and motivation that comes from working diligently with people who care. As SimpleNexus merged with nCino, our design team gained and lost many brothers and sisters. A united front is both urgent and timely.

### **Teamwork makes the dream work**

Mitch Clements and Cori Jones. I regularly soundboard ideas with them when piloting new ideas. Thanks to them and my fellow designers for being open to change and growth. I appreciate the trust.

Culture of craft and collaboration

eSign is like DocuSign but with encryption and tampersealing, a compliance requirement for Promissory Notes...basically the deed to a house, the very document you show a judge when claiming a home is yours.

### **Problem**

eVault was "unsellable" because incumbents offer their products with document-eSign solutions. We had to spin up a MVP that still satisfies a wide range of needs as it touches most users across the ecosystem.

### **Challenge**

**Timing.** Sales was blocked until this MVP was ready for customers. We handled scope and priorities diligently.

**Multiplatform experience.** Web, mobile, and email experience was crucial as it now touches Borrowers, a user-base that primarily uses mobile. It also had to talk to a few systems to get and push data.

**Satisfying a range of users.** Lots of cross-team collaboration on this as it interface many types of users: Borrowers, Lender teams, and Investors.

**Integrate into product ecosystem.** Lots of cross-team collaboration to connect systems before and after touching nCino eSign. eConsent was a big challenge as we juggled legal needs with consistent-yet-frictionless-experience needs.

### **Solution**

It's alive and playing nice in our SimpleNexus product ecosystem. Provides the value needed to finally sell our eVault in this new product bundle. Yeah, Disney+ but also ESPN.

It's MVP but satisfies compliance needs with eConsent and Audit logs, lender needs with Admin Management abilities, and product ecosystem needs by considering how it fits in our eClosing service.

### **Team**

Shane Herd, Ryan Jensen, Brett Hays, Nelson Chou, Gabby Kibrick, Vlad Balashoff, and more.

nCino eSign

### **Problem**

SimpleNexus provides the industry's leading point-of-sale software. If you’ve used a mobile app to apply for a home loan, then you've used SimpleNexus. A mobile and web platform that enables lenders to meet borrowers where they are and enable their dream team to close and sell loans.

The company, ripe for expansion, decided to invest in building software for the secondary market – yup, bigger fish.

I led design on this product, working closely with my talented Investor team to build a product that aligns with regulatory, vendor, interoperability, customer, and user requirements while also extending the ease, discoverability, and scale of thoughtful technology.

nCino eVault is a document custodian (a digital vault) where organizations hold and transact on mortgage-backed securities.

### **Challenge**

**Understanding complex industry knowledge.** Mortgage is an in-club but the information is out there. I personally enjoyed diving in a space I knew nothing about. My fresh eyes and pulse on emerging tech helped bring new ideas to biased audiences. Building a deeper understanding helped me architect solutions that catered to a wide range of specific use cases and industry changes.

**Regulations changing in real time.** eVault is still "new" so protocols are being made in real time. My PM Nelson Chou and VP Jay Arneja were key to bringing industry news back to us builders. Then we talk about how to abide yet push for better interactions.

**Security and audit trails.** Big assets means big risk, and lots of laws means customers have legal needs. We worked through how to store assets securely while providing visibility to our customers. Reliable systems / data and user trust via transparency were priorities.

**Federal and inconsistent state laws** made it difficult to create single-solution features. Everything needs to be considered from multiple angles, especially the angle of "how do we protect our customers from getting sued?"

**Interoperability with legacy systems.** Compromises of ideal experiences were made to accommodate widely-used, archaic systems. Hard but a key to adoption.

**Balancing compliance and innovation.** We worked closely with our vendors, advisors, and industry partners to make sure we understood compliance rules. This allowed us to identify where we could innovate and build optimal experiences despite constraints.

**Easy contract value.** eVault took 2 years until we felt it was ready for customers. Once trying to market, we learned that we needed to provide the whole eClosing bundle for them to switch platforms. We quickly built nCino eSign to sweeten the deal.

### **Outcome**

Despite the volatile economy, our product has early adopters. We're monitoring and iterating as we go. And graciously, we recognized by MERS (the people who approve these things) as a lovable product.

### **A player team!**

Collaboration with Shane Herd, Nelson Chou, Jay Arneja, Trevan Reese, Ryan Jensen, Brett Hays, Matt Corbett, and many more to build this beast!

nCino eVault

My job is to dig deep and find holes in experience across our ecosystem in efforts to increase adoption. This role considers how the industry is co-creating in the eVault space, making decisions and regulations in real time as the mortgage industry goes digital.

### **Approaches**

**Facilitate alignment workshops.** I facilitated cross-teams workshops, in-person and remote, to align on problems, challenges, and outcomes. This allows us to build a vision and strategy to share with our teams.

**Visualizing complexity.** Mapping information that can reach wide audiences helps make collaboration on root problems possible. I use visuals to distill large amounts of info to its essence. It's the essence that inspire people to build.

**Speculative design and feedback.** Collaborate with my design partner Brittany Cates to diagnose pitfalls in user experience and imagine what could be, presenting it to key stakeholders including VP, support, customer success, and product management for feedback.

**Interviewing users and customers.** Users vs customers...talking to the right person is tricky in B2B2C spaces, and with limited resources. We rely on market research, internal user research, and feedback from customers, talking to external users as much as we can.

**Tight feedback loop with support.** The voices of the customer are crucial for product-market fit. Our support and customer success teams deny ideas that aren't realistic to what they hear. This loop sharpens our intuition on how to approach root problems with first principles.

### **Outcomes so far**

Our teams are aligned on the problems, challenges, and desired outcomes. We are gradually getting resources to focus on keystone problems head-on.

We've overcome communication silos impacting our problem-solving by setting up relationships and channels with our teams closest to the customers.

More to come.

### **Working with a great team**

Brittany Cates, Nelson Chou, Bryan Manwaring, Tyler Durrans, Jay Arneja, Tyler Prows, Brandon Bromiley, Jordan Wild, and many more.

eClose adoption

artist and designer

So good they can’t ignore you — how craftsmanship builds great careers

Stories communicate the value of design — how storytelling separates the good from great

Minored in Biology and Management. Got to learn about systems in biology and human behavior. Wrote my thesis on org culture in US vs Japan.

Immersive exhibition in Mission, SF. Think cave-themed, lavender-smelling, high-frequency-sounding, reflective-booklet-writing, flashlight-zooming experience.

Cave art: exploring being and becoming

Generational healing

Story capture

Group lead and mentor. Taught, advocated, and created spaces that supported designers, team infrastructure, and organizational influence.

Design culture

Product design lead on eSign. Think DocuSign but with encryption, tampersealing, and automated storage in a vault, our eVault.

Product design lead on eVault. It stores mortgage-backed securities for small brokers, large government entities, and all the investors in-between.

Led discovery, user research, and design architecture for Role-based access control on our core platform, collaborating heavily to navigate legacy and dependency constraints.

Admin user and role management

Researched ecosystem questions affecting adoption. I focused on R&D, vision and strategy, and speculative design.

Writing about creating towards a delightful life. Topics include creativity, psychology, and relationships.

Writing

Focused on bespoke dinner menus and commissioned art.\
\
Now this is my full-time job!

Everyday celebrations collection

SF Marathon

A designer's guide to systems thinking.\
\
Had to let this project die since it wasn't my main passion, though something I'm passionate about. You can still read my content on Medium.

Top Writer in Design on Medium 2020, Featured in UX Collective, Curious, Design Warp, Cofounderstown, and UX Design Weekly Newsletter.

Writing about design

50K San Lorenzo River Run

Worked with a team of ambassadors to brainstorm, organize, and prioritize events that engage the running community.

Ambassador

Guided students through creative endeavors in a summer youths arts program. Really enjoying engaging with my community.

Art Mentor

Led design on ecosystem-level projects affecting Admins and related users across the Mortgage platform such as introducing Role-Based Access Control User Management and speculative design for multi-level Audit Logs.

Senior Product Designer on Admin team

Led design for an AI co-pilot for product teams. Explored concepts enabling play, creativity, and trust into software and user relationships.

Lead Product Designer

Early employee in a startup, servicing celebrity clients. 5 years of non-stop building! Where I learned how to give top-tier service.

Designed + delivered user-centered curriculum based on user testing, adapting to user and client needs.

Concept + design for an EdTech game we developed.

Education Service Designer

Led design on nCino eVault and nCino eSign, fintech product bundle servicing large enterprise + government organizations. Launched go-to market.

Led R&D on eClosing core experiences. Known as the go-to facilitator for discovery, decision-making, and alignment workshops.

Coached designers and others on craft and collaboration. Started rituals that allow regular dialogue on design patterns, philosophy, and process. Responsibilities as a UX Manager.

Overall, big focus on leadership through big, hairy problems; designing for complexity with interoperability, scale, and elegance; and storytelling to wide audiences using data visualization.

Senior Product Designer on Investor team

Creating safe spaces where people can heal and get wacky

Artist and Owner

Worked at a design and development agency, servicing small business to enterprise clients. Huge focus on craft with intense, fun craftspeople.

Worked at Meta, Vivint, and Progressive Leasing from concept to design to feature flags. Problems ranged in scale and collaboration. Vivint one was by far my favorite.

caroline luu

2023