HOME BUYING PLAN

Senior Experience Designer

1+ years - launched in November 2022

The objective of this project was to create an experience that could help clients with a home buying goal plan, save, and be better prepared. We hypothesized that a personalized plan, with particular milestones could help guide clients along their unique pathway to achieving. home ownership.

Our team consisted of: Product Manager, UX Designer, UX Writer, UX Researcher, Solution Architect

Through some initial user testing and market research we understood that:
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1. Buying a home is stressful. Even those who are prepared can sometimes face challenges in knowing how the mortgage process works. When we talked to users they mentioned words like: overwhelmed, frustrated, nervous, or intimidated, to describe buying their home.
2. Many people don’t know how to prepare. In order to get a mortgage, and often times one with a comfortable interest rate, one must have certain financial factors in place where they can be approved by a lender.
3. People don’t know who they can trust. Most lenders want to sell a mortgage to a client as soon as possible. (Think friend v. car salesman)

The Home Buying Plan was launched in November 2022.

I contributed to the overall strategy of the Home Buying Plan as an experience that would learn from and nurture various types of clients toward their home ownership goal. This consisted of initial discovery and planning sessions with product teams and business stakeholders.
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However, we first wanted to know if this idea would be of value to users. I came up with a proof of concept to user test.
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We learned:

1. That most participants found the information useful and were excited to have it be all in one place.
2. Users thought the personalized content was more digestible than other similar products they had seen.
3. Some users would be hesitant to connect their data to take full advantage of the plan’s capabilities.

We iterated on designs through critiques, stakeholder reviews, and collaborative team exercises.

We started leaning heavily into ideas around how to engage users with their plan. How could we get them coming back and ensuring they were making progress? Our original idea had check-off items, but we really started to explore a set of tasks that a user could complete at their own pace in order to be in the best possible shape for a home purchase.

Understanding that with buying a home, there are 3-4 really big factors that go into how qualified a person is to getting a mortgage and how beneficial that solution is to their situation, we leaned heavily into how best to give users control and transparency into those factors.

We created a mobile design mid-fi focused on an affordability cost, down payment savings, and debt-to-income ratio. We took that design back to users to get feedback.

For the next user test we recruited participants who were at least 6 months away from purchasing a home.

We learned:

1. Not all participants made the connection that monthly expenses would have an impact on monthly mortgage payment.
2. Many participants wanted to see or know how mortgage rates played a factor in the experience they were looking at.
3. Most understood that language like "on track" meant they were making positive progress toward a goal.

We now understood that having clearer indications between a user's information in their Home Buying Plan would be crucial.  
We kept many of the useful features of previous designs, as well as some of the language that users had gravitated to during tests. But we started exploring ways of tying those 3-4 big factors of a home purchase goal together for a client.

We started exploring designs which opened with a home buying goal statement that a client could potentially edit, but would hopefully ground them when they entered their plan.