As the mortgage landscape continues to rapidly change and redefine itself, usability and seamless integration remain critical components to effectively navigate these waters. Lenders and vendors are constantly looking for ways to streamline their offerings and engage users to produce viable and sustainable revenue model in today’s mortgage market. This includes new innovation which delivers usability and seamless integration of software and service solutions to address the ever changing needs and demands of the mortgage industry. Can the mortgage industry take a page out of Apple’s iPhone playbook to respond to these challenges?
For the past 10 or so years I have been a Treo smart phone user. The couple of models that I have had have worked well and allowed me to be a very productive mobile user taking advantage of email, PDF’s, power point presentations, Excel documents to name a few. One challenge that I often encountered was the proper syncing of my phone. It would change time zones from eastern to central, freeze up when email came in at the same time as a phone call or I would have to reinstall the syncing software to get things working again. I never had any success adding music or additional productivity applications in a seamless manner to my Treo.
Because of a number of the recent issues I was having with syncing and the fact that my current phone was a few years old I decided to check out all of the hype regarding the Apple iPhone before purchasing another Treo. I did quite a bit of research, spoke with a number of iPhone users and contemplated the price point compared to the other top smart phones. I decided that I would give the iPhone a try. I was cautiously optimistic about my new purchase.
Within 30 minutes of my new purchase, I had all of my contacts, calendar, music, podcasts, movies, and voice mail fully synced. It could not have been any easier, which more than justified the switch and improved my productivity instantly. To my surprise that was only the tip of the iceberg. Now that my phone was doing everything that I needed it to do and because of the ease at which I was able to sync everything, I decided to visit the iTunes app store.
I was amazed to find over 25,000 apps in the iTunes app store in several categories: Books, Business, Education, Entertainment, Finance, Games, Healthcare & Fitness, Lifestyle, Medical, Music, Navigation, News, Photography, Productivity, Reference, Social Networking, Sports, Travel, Utilities and Weather. As Apple states “applications unlike anything you’ve seen on a phone before. Applications designed for iPhone are nothing short of amazing. That’s because they leverage the groundbreaking technology in iPhone — like the Multi-Touch interface, the accelerometer, GPS, real-time 3D graphics, and 3D positional audio. Just tap into the App Store and choose from thousands of applications ready to download now.”
Once again within seconds I was able to download numerous apps such as Kindle to read books while traveling, all with the ease of one click. Not only was I astonished by the number of applications, but more importantly the incredible usability and seamless integration of software, my desktop, the Internet media and service all in one powerful mobile device. I was able to seamlessly integrate dozens of applications that significantly increase my user experience and usefulness of my new purchase.
Apple’s approach to usability and seamless integration made me ponder how this innovative strategy could be applied to the mortgage industry. As we work together to provide innovative solutions to this rapidly changing mortgage marketplace, delivering seamless integration across the entire mortgage lifecycle with enhanced usability is one area that we should start with.
What areas of the mortgage process could be improved with innovative usability solutions? Are vendors willing to expose API’s so that more applications can be written to provide seamless integration? What can we learn from this approach that will truly enhance the overall user experience in the mortgage industry? Is the mortgage process far too complicated for such an approach?
I for one am sold on the power of the iPhone with its seamless integration and incredible usability and believe that the mortgage industry can truly benefit from innovative strategies like these. Please share with us your thoughts?
