CARM-Pro™
CARM-Pro™ Online
Rebuilding a debt-collection and asset-recovery platform for banks and credit unions — turning a dense, guess-as-you-go legacy interface into a calm, learnable workspace.
The brief
CARM-Pro™ Online is a collection and asset-recovery platform used by banks and credit unions to work delinquent accounts — from first contact through bankruptcy, foreclosure, repossession and recovery. It is built by Intelligent Banking Solutions (IBS), based in New Hampshire.
The product had grown powerful but hard to use: a data-dense interface where collectors had to already know the system to get anything done. My work covered a Phase-1 interface revamp, a competitor scan of adjacent collections software, and a redesigned sign-in experience.
What made it hard
Three questions defined the work — the same ones a new collector silently asks on day one.
Where do I even start?
There was no home screen or dashboard. Users landed in raw data with no sense of priority, queue or "what needs me today."
How is this supposed to work?
No in-app help, search or guidance. Common tasks — and configuration — often required hand-written SQL to get right.
Why does it feel like this?
Cramped windows, inconsistent dialogs and near-zero branding. The interface read as a database, not a tool for stressed people under deadline.
"Everything has to be guessed. Not intuitive."— Verbatim, from the heuristic audit of the legacy system
Auditing the legacy system
I walked the existing product against Steve Krug's usability heuristics and logged what actually broke down. Five findings shaped everything after.
Nothing was learnable
No help, no search, no guidance. New users had no on-ramp — the system assumed prior mastery.
No home, no dashboard
Users opened into data with no overview of workload, priority or portfolio health.
Configuration meant SQL
Setting up workflows and rules dropped power-users into hand-written queries — brittle and exclusionary.
Ticklers interrupted, repeatedly
Reminder pop-ups (“ticklers”) surfaced constantly and needed repeated clicks to clear.
Branding was zero
Inconsistent dialogs and unstyled forms gave no sense of a considered, trustworthy product.
Who actually uses it
Three primary roles, each with a different relationship to the same accounts.
Sarah
- Work her queue efficiently
- Log every contact accurately
- Hunts for information across screens
- Interrupted by ticklers
John
- See team & portfolio health at a glance
- Direct effort where it pays off
- No overview — chases status manually
- Reporting is buried
Maria
- Keep account data clean & compliant
- Trust what the system reports
- Manual data handling
- Hard to verify accuracy quickly
The reality behind the roles
Collectors work with stressed, often uncooperative debtors, and have to surface accurate facts fast, act on them, and document everything — because the record may end up in court. The interface either helps them do that under pressure, or gets in the way.
Design principles
Framed around Krug's "Don't Make Me Think" — a deliberately blunt rubric for a system that had made people think far too much.
Clarity & simplicity
Show the account's state plainly. Reduce visual noise so the important thing is the obvious thing.
Don't make users think
Remove guesswork. Every screen should answer "what is this and what do I do next?" without training.
Obvious navigation
A consistent, always-present menu so people never wonder where they are or how to get back.
Cut half the words
Then cut half again. Labels and dialogs earn their space or leave.
Competitive scan
Six tools adjacent to collections and recovery, studied for how each frames a portfolio, a queue and a day's work.
AKUVO Aperture
Portfolio analytics, delinquency migration and geographic views that actively steer where collectors spend time.
Fintegrate Fusion CRS
Heavy on team & collector activity gauges — calls, accounts worked, promises — as the primary daily view.
Temenos
A clean, dashboard-first developer/admin interface where charts carry the story over dense tables.
MeridianLink Engage
Frames outreach as marketing-style campaigns with performance cards rather than one-account-at-a-time work.
Coastal Collections Solution
A customer-data-centric collections screen — everything about one account gathered on a single working surface.
Microsoft Excel
Included in the scan as a reminder: spreadsheets are still where many collections workflows quietly live.
What it pointed to
The strongest tools open on a considered overview — team activity, portfolio health, or a clear queue — instead of raw data. That confirmed the biggest single gap in CARM-Pro: there was no "front door." A dashboard and an obvious, persistent navigation would do more for everyday usability than any individual screen.
Competitor screens are shown as design-research artifacts and belong to their respective owners. Any figures or testimonials visible within them are those vendors' own material, not results of this project.
Navigation & structure
The redesign settles the "where am I?" problem with one persistent top-level menu, and a consistent tab set inside every client record.
A left-hand tree holds the contact and every account they owe on; the tabs above give consistent, predictable access to each dimension of a case — so a collector, manager and analyst all navigate the same way.
The redesign
Same information, same power — rehoused in the official brand palette (Lochmara blue and Picton blue), with room to breathe, a real hierarchy and one consistent dialog system.
One dialog system, everywhere
The legacy product had a different-looking dialog for every task. The redesign gives them a single template — a titled card, clear fields, and consistent primary/secondary actions — so a new dialog is never a new thing to learn.
Sign-in, explored
The first thing every user sees. I explored three directions for the redesigned sign-in — the same login card over different brand-led backdrops — before the experience was carried into the live product.
The wider revamp shown here, the redesigned sign-in is the part that shipped to the live system.
Reflection
The hardest part of this project wasn't visual — it was restraint. CARM-Pro is genuinely powerful, and the temptation with a legacy revamp is to redesign everything. The higher-leverage move was smaller: give the product a front door, a consistent menu, and one dialog system, then let the density that domain experts actually rely on stay intact.
Working as the sole designer against a live, regulated collections product also meant designing with humility — the people using this are under real pressure with real legal stakes, and "cleaner" is only worth anything if it makes their day faster, not prettier.
Some questions stayed open at hand-off, and I'd rather show them than pretend the work was finished.
Open questions at hand-off
- Should the dashboard be read-only, or editable in place?
- Are the bank's own clients a persona we should design for directly?
- How far can configuration move away from SQL without losing power-user control?
Have a complex product that needs untangling?
This is the kind of operational, high-stakes software I design for a living. These are the NDA-friendly highlights. The good stuff comes later.
Low bounce rate. Nice. →