The LOS has an ubiquitous presence in the day-to-day work of loan officers, underwriters and other lender employees. For these industry professionals, the LOS is a technology used as often as Web browsers and productivity applications like the Microsoft Office suite. So, even today, upcoming changes to it have to be made to it carefully.
To understand why, one must consider the history of the LOS.
Because the LOS is so critical to the operations of a mortgage lender, software developers have to not only make sure their technology works, but that it's also intuitive, easy to use and visually pleasing—or at least easy on the eyes. The LOS should allow users to be more effective in their jobs, not be a source of unneeded confusion or frustration.
It takes considerable effort for LOS vendors to develop and maintain their technology's user interface, with developers going so far as to bring in outside consultants, engage their customer base for multiple rounds of testing and analyzing minute details like color palate and font type and size before making even the slightest changes are made.
But that wasn't always the case, said Scott Cooley, who is widely recognized for developing the industry's first LOS, Contour, which debuted in 1982.
“When we first started writing an LOS, the user interface was an afterthought, it was a means to an end,” he said. The LOS was meant to “do the calculations and do the data entry and print out all these documents. At the core, the LOS was a system that you could enter borrower information and it would spit it out on 50 different documents.”
Cooley, who wrote the Contour LOS on an Apple II computer, credits Apple co-founder Steve Jobs for revolutionizing the emphasis on the user experience for the entire technology sector, including mortgage software.
“Steve Jobs' forte was to take complicated technology and make it as simple and easy to use as it could be,” Cooley said. “Jobs elevated the bar for user design and ease of us. He made every software designer out there you have to factor in user design issues. Your product will die without it.”
As hardware capabilities and software architecture evolve and become more robust, developers work to add new functions to improve on the design and aesthetics of their software. But even the most well-intended enhancements can face backlash from users.
After maintaining a relatively consistent look and feel to its menus and toolbars for nearly two decades, Microsoft completely redesigned the interface with icon-based tabs called ribbon control, beginning with its Office 2007 release. The change was so jarring to users that third-party vendors began offering various plug-ins to the Office suite to give users the ability to use the old menu and toolbar interface they are more comfortable with.
With few competitors to challenge its market share, Microsoft can hold firm on the ribbon controls in the Office suite and force users to adapt. But the LOS market is fragmented, with more than 30 vendors providing competing products, so LOS developers have to find a delicate balance between keeping their products modern without disrupting users' comfort level.
A few years ago, San Jose, Calif.-based Calyx Software changed the format of loan application printouts on its Point LOS from legal-size to letter-size paper, upsetting many customers. While he wasn't at the company at the time, Ted Hicks, Calyx's product management group director, said the episode is still fresh on the minds of colleagues who experienced it.
“It's one of the lessons I had to learn from other people who say, 'Ted, you're mucking around with the UI too much. This is what happened in the past when we made these changes—we had such call volumes and such outrage and people were super upset with us just from a small change like that,'” Hicks said.
“If you make any kind of changes, I mean any small change, to the Point UI, it is incredibly difficult to pull off because the Point UI is so familiar to so many users and so intuitive that those UI changes—making a button change, a font change, or moving the location of something—it comes with a significant amount of end-user distress, so we have to make those screens consistent in their look and feel,” he added.
There are different reasons for updating a software's UI—to attract new customers, modernize the look, or to make it easier for users to work with the software. But Hicks believes that LOS customers prefer consistency over cosmetic facelifts, which is why Point has maintained a consistent look and feel throughout the years.
“People who buy mortgage technology products aren't looking for bells and whistles on their software. Certainly they don't mind them, but what they're looking for is software that makes it easier for them to use, easy to administer and easy to maintain,” Hicks said. “And if that makes the software look older, then that's what the software looks like. If it makes it look more modern, then that's what the software looks like.”
Rather than give existing technology a facelift, Hicks said developers find it necessary to release entirely new products to avoid backlash from existing users while offering a product that appeals to new clients.
“With that new product line using new technology, no one is using it, so your user interface can be completely different than what you have today,” he said.
Hicks is overseeing the development of a new LOS called Path that Calyx plans to launch in test versions at the beginning of 2012. It won't replace Point, rather it will be offered as an alternative targeted to mortgage bankers and depositories.
“This product is different because it's much more workflow oriented,” he said. “Point is really about filling out a specific form for whatever reason you need to fill out that form. Path is about completing a specific task and it will print out the correct forms for you when you complete your task...it has a different UI paradigm because it is a different product.”
LOS and servicing platform vendor Financial Industry Computer Systems is giving its entire suite of products a facelift, starting with its LOS. The overhaul is part of a rewrite FICS is conducting to convert the software to Microsoft's .NET architecture. FICS isn't converting its database to the .NET framework, but the system rewrite will create separate architectures for the user interface and the business logic, making it easier to update the Loan Producer LOS in the future.
FICS president Susan Graham said many of the changes to the LOS user interface make options and tools more accessible to users. In the current version of the software, features and abilities, like the system's spell-check and help menus, were accessed with the keyboard function keys, which means the user had to know which function keys were assigned to each tool. In the redesigned LOS, those tools and functions will be accessed with icons, drop-down menus and other visual prompts.
“When we designed the system this time, we took the stance that when you look at a window, the user should be able to visually recognize those functions,” Graham said. “We didn't want the users to have learn a whole new system. Most of the logic is still there and where we could; we added many more bells and whistles to help make the system even more user friendly.”
The LOS facelift is scheduled to roll out to customers in April. After that, the other FICS products will be updated so that all of the systems have a consistent look and feel. “We try to make sure our user interfaces are consistent so if customers with multiple systems of ours know some basics, they can easily maneuver between the systems,” Graham said.
The revamped Loan Producer will also include Office-style ribbon controls built from a Microsoft-designed UI tool included in the .NET platform. Graham said despite the early backlash to ribbon controls, users are becoming more comfortable with the feature, including FICS employees, who use the Office 2010 suite at their Dallas headquarters.
“We had a users conference this year and showed them the new user interface and we had a very positive reaction, they loved all of the enhancements and ribbon control was something they liked,” she said. “We hope the group that attended our conference is representative of the rest of our customers using our system.”
