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CASE STUDY / 02Redesigning Condition Management
BMO’s mortgage-condition workflow relied on separate CFS and CCAPS legacy systems, plus Mortgage Characteristics. UI errors, missing feedback, and unclear document completion slowed work for bank staff and customers. As Lead UX for condition management, I built on earlier exploration and connected the retained systems through a refreshed Condition Hub, designed to cut purchasing time to about 25 minutes (from about 45), application approval to about 16 minutes, and application completion to one day.
Condition Hub · Dashboard states
- Problem
- Two misaligned legacy systems (CFS & CCAPS) made condition fulfilment slow, opaque, and error-prone for mortgage applicants and bank staff.
- Why it mattered
- Completing a mortgage application took up to three days. UI errors froze systems; applicants received no feedback and experienced repeated delays.
- My responsibility
- Lead UX for condition management: discovery, interaction design, component creation, prototyping for research, copy collaboration, and handoff over eight months.
- What changed
- A unified Condition Hub connected CFS, CCAPS and Mortgage Characteristics behind a coherent interface, making requirements reviewable, progress visible, and additional work actionable.
The problem
Two separate legacy systems — CFS for conditions and CCAPS for mortgage applications — handled different parts of the same process, managed by teams that were not aligned. UI errors could freeze either system, and customers often received no feedback about what was missing or still required.
- 01
Receive conditions
Applicant receives a list of terms and conditions across disconnected systems; no consolidated view. - 02
Upload documents
Customers often believed all required documents were uploaded when they had not been — causing further delays with no system feedback. - 03
Await review
UI errors in CFS or CCAPS could freeze the system; staff and customers had no visibility into approval status. - 04
Approval or delay
Finalizing an application took around 45 minutes; approvals often exceeded 24 hours; total completion could take three days or more.
Opaque status and disconnected systems were the core breakdown — applicants could not tell what was still needed or why approval was delayed.
The principal systems were staying in place. The design needed to connect them through a refreshed experience while working with the technology team’s limitations. I joined one month into development, taking over Lead UX from senior colleague Greg, within an approximately eight-month delivery window.
I reviewed Greg's earlier semi-lean UX exploration, spoke to key stakeholders including the Product Owner, and worked with the UX Researcher to understand customer struggles and expectations. The team operated in an Agile cadence with Figma as the primary collaboration tool.
The decisions
Three consequential design choices defined how the new Condition Hub worked: how the systems would be connected, how requirements would be communicated, and how additional work would be supported with clear feedback.
Connect the systems through a coherent experience
Keep CFS and CCAPS, and connect them and Mortgage Characteristics through a refreshed Condition Hub. Four dashboard areas organize application status and information, filtering by TAC type, terms and conditions, and uploaded supporting documents.
The redesign focused on the user-facing workflow rather than replacing core platforms, with filters, categories, progress, unresolved irregularities, empty states, and status visibility.
Make requirements understandable and reviewable
TAC types were made explicit and distinguished: Primary (most important to satisfy first), Secondary (can be dealt with later), and Solicitor (used by the application's lawyer). Each condition included a description so applicants understood what was being asked.
Recommended TACs were derived from personal information already supplied by the applicant — customers could review and select the relevant items rather than guess. An additional system surfacing mortgage options and application characteristics emerged later in the project, adding a review → characteristic selection → loading → confirmed-added flow.
Status codes were retained from the underlying system to support bank-side clarity.
Support additional work with clear, actionable feedback
Missing feedback made it hard to know what had happened or what remained to do. The additional-TAC flow lets users search existing conditions, create a new TAC, confirm it was added, and add selected TACs to the application.
The solicitor flow covers search by name and phone number, loading, database results, and selection, with a clear response at every step.
Leading the work
Identifying customer and business needs, making design decisions under development constraints, and coordinating across disciplines, building on Greg's earlier exploration, to deliver a coherent experience within an eight-month window.
Product
Identified customer and business needs; defined scope boundaries for CFS/CCAPS retention
Product Owner and Business Analyst coordinated Agile delivery and launch
Design
Built and added features; incorporated existing design-system components and created new ones; sought feedback from other designers
Assembled prototype quickly for UX research to test and gather feedback immediately before launch
Engineering
Technology team; discussed limitations with tech to find feasible solutions within CFS/CCAPS constraints
QA and the Scrum Master were part of the cross-functional delivery team.
Continued from Greg's exploration; built and added features to the Condition Hub; incorporated existing design-system components and created new ones; sought feedback from other designers; partnered with the copywriter on interface text; discussed constraints with the technology team; assembled the prototype for pre-launch research.
The UX Researcher supported discovery and prelaunch testing; the copywriter collaborated on interface language. The Product Owner and Business Analyst coordinated launch. The Scrum Master, QA, and technology team were also part of the cross-functional team.
Greg — senior design colleague, earlier UX exploration and initial direction. UX Researcher — user research and testing. Copywriter — interface text and language. Product Owner, Business Analyst, Scrum Master, QA, and technology team — delivery, coordination, and launch.
The result
The Condition Hub addressed the usability issues and made the process easier for staff and customers. It was designed against three targets.
25
Design target: about 25 minutes to complete purchasing, down from the roughly 45 minutes it took to finalize an application.16
Design target: about 16 minutes. Previously, approvals often took more than 24 hours.1
Design target: one day. Previously, completing an application could take three days or longer.Mortgage processing proved more complex than it first appeared. Requirements for mortgage options and application characteristics emerged during the work and were incorporated. At the eight-month mark, the Product Owner and Business Analyst coordinated launch, and I moved on.