Farm Credit Mid-America
Modernizing a century-old lender without losing the human connection
My Role:
Product Design
User Research
Strategy
Copywriting
Illustration
Overview:
2020 – 2026
Financial Services
B2C & B2B
Web App & Design System
Meet Farm Credit Mid-America
For 100 years, relationships were our interface
Farm Credit Mid-America finances farms, land, equipment, and agricultural operations. It’s a customer-owned business where customers share in the organization’s success—and often know their Financial Officer personally. Those relationships are central to how the company works.
Our customers still valued the personal relationship. They just wanted more ways to interact with us.
A century of serving agricultural communities.
Apply Online
My first project started with a business problem.
Small agricultural loans were too expensive to originate through our traditional process.
We needed a simpler way to serve those customers. Apply Online would become our first customer-facing lending experience. We kept the initial scope focused, with plans to scale over time.
Start with loans under $75K in Tennessee
Launch an MVP in six months
Enable same-day decisions
Before I could design the experience, I needed to understand the business behind it.
Discovery
I didn’t know agricultural lending, so I asked the people who did.
My team and I spent time with Financial Officers, watching how they worked and asking questions to map the systems, conversations, and decisions behind a loan application.
One of the journey maps showing the conversations, systems, and decisions behind a loan application.
Storyboards helped stakeholders envision the customer journey across in-person, phone, and online interactions.
Financial Officers helped customers understand their options, clarified unfamiliar questions, and guided them toward the next step. Our challenge was to create a digital version of these conversations, rooted in four principles:
Bite-sized
One decision at a time.
Conversational
Write like a person.
Helpful
More context one click away.
Familiar
Use the customer’s language.
User testing
Before we could test with customers, we had to earn access to them.
Financial Officers were protective of their customer relationships. Putting unfinished work in front of customers was unfamiliar territory for Farm Credit Mid-America, and getting access took some convincing.
We were eventually able to test our designs with customers. Those sessions helped us improve Apply Online and showed the team the value of involving customers before the work was finished.
Testing early Apply Online designs with customers and the people who knew them best.
Beyond the MVP
Launching Apply Online was just the beginning.
We launched a focused MVP, then kept expanding it. Apply Online grew to support more complex real estate loans, applications for businesses, and customers across Farm Credit Mid-America’s full six-state territory.
Apply Online made it possible for our customers to apply anytime, anywhere, and from any device.
A little personality goes a long way
I used conversational questions and custom illustrations to give the application a friendlier feel, with small moments of delight sprinkled in along the way.
Each icon was designed using a key line grid to help keep the set consistent and visually balanced.
Nearly 50 custom icons were ultimately designed as part of the full set.
I animated icons to add delight to “Preparing Docs” and “Verifying Identity.”
Apply Online was designed for mobile from the start.
Large, tappable UI and minimal reading made it quick and easy for customers to apply.
Outcomes
We built Apply Online to better serve existing customers. But tracking it after launch revealed something we hadn’t expected: it was bringing in a lot of new customers!
New customers
Avg time to apply
NPS post-application
Strongly agreed it was easy
That unexpected reach raised a bigger question. How could we keep building on what we had started?
Our next big opportunity
Applying was easy. Everything else, not so much.
Our customers still had A LOT of frustrations.
So, we asked 400+ customers what they expected in a digital experience with us.
Single Sign-On
“I have too many logins to remember”
Transparency
“I don’t know what happens after I apply”
Tasks
“Make it easier for me to upload documents”
Loans
“Let me see my balances and statements”
Payments
“Make it easier for me to pay my bill on time”
Self-Service
“I want to do this from home or late at night”
Many were table stakes. But together, they gave us the foundation for myAccount.
Building myAccount
I applied. Now what?
The Loan Status Tracker gave customers a reason to create a myAccount profile, while giving us a foundation to build on.
Early design direction for the Loan Status Tracker.
The Loan Status Tracker gave us a focused place to start. It addressed a clear gap after applying and gave customers a reason to create a myAccount profile.
It also brought together the pieces we would need to keep growing: account creation, single sign-on, transactional messaging, an application framework, and our Almanac Design System. We were building a useful first experience with a foundation for the next one.
We brought farmers into the process early
Working with an outside research firm, we tested seven scenarios with eight farmers. We wanted to know whether customers understood where they were in the process, what was happening, and what would come next.
We interviewed eight working farmers and tested the effectiveness of our initial Loan Status Tracker designs.
Customers liked the tracker concept, but wanted more information. We used their feedback to improve the design before building.
More Data
Rates, payment amount, and other loan details.
More Context
Why was I declined? What do I need to provide?
More Timelines
When will I get a decision, a phone call, or my funds?
More Communication
Status notifications as the application progresses.
What we shipped (and learned)
We designed 4 steps, but only shipped 3.
Applied
Decision
Closing
Funding
Late in delivery, we learned we couldn’t reliably show the Funding step with the data available. We cut it, adjusted the experience, and shipped without it.
Our retrospective surfaced something we needed to change. Feasibility conversations had to happen earlier. Product Management, Design, and Architecture began doing more work together during early exploration, before teams got too far into defining the solution.
The shipped tracker covered 3 phases: Applied, Decision, and Closing.
Growing the platform
Ramping up the roadmap.
The foundation helped us move faster and bring more teams in.
As myAccount proved its value, business teams saw new ways it could help. Our PM shared the roadmap across the organization so those teams could understand our priorities and bring their needs into the conversation.
Our roadmap used three swim lanes to help balance customer needs and business goals.
We weighed those opportunities against customer interviews, input from our Customer Champions group, ongoing feedback, and product metrics. That balance shaped the next stage of the platform.
Tasks
From checking a loan status to getting work done.
Tasks expanded myAccount into document uploads, identity verification, digital balance sheets, rate and payment selection, and more. Customers could do more of the work needed to keep their relationship with Farm Credit Mid-America moving.
Tasks ranged from simple document uploads to creating a balance sheet from scratch.
A year after launch, adoption and operational efficiency continued to improve.
Tasks sent to customers
Loans now processed faster
Loan details & paperless
Our most requested feature unlocked a $1 million opportunity.
The basics can go a long way.
Customers wanted access to their loan details. Pairing that visibility with paperless delivery created an opportunity to make everyday information easier to find while reducing printing and postage.
We had our first paperless signup within 10 seconds of shipping this work!
The expected customer benefits were just as practical: fewer calls for basic information, greater loan transparency, and more reasons to use myAccount.
Patronage Payouts
Celebrating customer loyalty while making the business more efficient.
Each year, Farm Credit Mid-America returns a portion of its profits to customers through patronage payouts. The experience gave customers a way to see their lifetime earnings and choose how to receive future payouts.
Showing patronage in myAccount reminds customers of a unique benefit we offer while appreciating their loyalty over the years.
It also supported a business goal: increasing direct deposit adoption to reduce checks, postage, and manual work. A familiar customer benefit became another opportunity to improve the experience on both sides.
Crop Insurance
A new line of business. A familiar place to start.
Near the end of my time at Farm Credit Mid-America, we began bringing Crop Insurance into myAccount. That meant learning a new domain, working with new business partners, and understanding different systems, data, and customer workflows.
Crop insurance was an entirely new line of business for us to learn and integrate into myAccount as a cohesive experience.
What we already had was a platform, a design system, and a solid foundation to build on. This allowed us to expand our reach across the organization while giving customers more of their Farm Credit Mid-America experience in one place.
Almanac design system
We stopped starting from scratch.
Almanac was the connective tissue running through everything discussed so far. It began alongside Apply Online, when a small group of designers and developers volunteered their time to build a shared foundation. We kept shaping it as the work grew.
Over the years, that grassroots effort became a product in its own right—and the backbone of our customer-facing experiences. More developers began using and contributing to it, giving Almanac a life beyond the small team that started it.
Almanac design system components, variables, design language, layout framework, and promotional branding.
Almanac made new features easier to build and the experience more consistent for customers. It also changed how we worked. Design and Engineering had a shared language and something we could keep shaping together, bringing the teams closer along the way.
Conclusion
Giving customers more ways to have a relationship
Looking back, I’m proud of the products we built and how we learned to work together. What began with a focused loan application grew into a customer platform and a stronger foundation for the work ahead.
My role grew alongside it—from learning the lending process and designing Apply Online to helping shape broader product decisions, research, and collaboration. There were tradeoffs, things we missed, and plenty to learn. Each experience helped us approach the next problem with a little more understanding.
The goal was never to replace the relationship. It was to give customers more ways to have one.