APEX side drawer
At Provide, loan agents worked each deal’s requirements in APEX, the company’s loan origination system. To check a supporting document, they left the requirement list and opened the file somewhere else. Then they had to find their place again. I designed a drawer that opens the document beside the list. It shipped in 2021 and was adopted across the platform.
Keeping the document beside the work
The drawer opens over the right side of the screen. The requirement list stays on the left, with the row the agent opened still in view. While reading a document, the agent can see which requirement it answers and what’s left on the list. Closing the drawer returns them to the same list.
Reviewing several documents
Each document opens as a tab across the top of the drawer, with one control to close them all. In the prototype, three years of the same tax return are open at once. An agent can move between years without going back to the list to reopen each file.
Verification by team
Different teams verify the same document against different criteria. The drawer gives each team its own panel. Sales and Operations each get a checklist, a comment thread, and their own Approve, Pending, and Flag actions. On the requirement list, each row carries a status for each team. The team-specific statuses distinguish each team’s review on the requirement list.
From one screen to a pattern
I first designed the drawer for verification work. Over time, it became clear that other teams needed the same thing: requirement documents open next to their own analysis. The drawer grew into a reusable pattern. A portfolio monitoring design, for example, uses it to hold a tax return next to the figures extracted from it. Across the platform, the drawer has been in use since 2021. It stayed in use after Fifth Third acquired Provide.
Related work: the requirement tabs
Separately, I worked on the three deal tabs built around each requirement. Requirements handled adding, removing, and editing. Verifications handled review, comments, and approval across teams. Progress tracked each requirement through the deal. My hypothesis was that bringing these tasks together around the shared requirement would reduce navigation between tabs. The work was more complex than I expected. Parts of it shipped, though I can’t confirm exactly which.
In that design work, the list held detail back until it was needed. Repeat uploads collapsed into one row with a count. A filter for current items hid superseded files, and the group header still reported how many it hid.