When a person's current or new home is involved in big financial decisions, we wanted to help to cut down the stress of finding the right lender based on your needs to help start the journey out right — and thus the Mortgage Matching Tool project was born. At ConsumerAffairs, the goal of all their content and services is to help their users with big life decisions and to guide them to the best choices for them. So, in terms of the ConsumerAffairs' mission and company direction, a matching tool was the perfect next product to introduce to their site and scale to all their other categories.

UX Research | Building Personas

When starting out this project, I wanted to know what the biggest deciding factors and pain points are when looking at mortgage lenders (whether the user be looking to refinance, get a home equity loan, purchase, or consider a reverse mortgage). I worked closely with a UX Research team to gather data and build out personas for the types of users that would use this tool. We found that it since this is a stressful process for majority of people, it was best to keep the questions in the matching tool to a minimal and only add in extra questions when it would provide help to the user in what other options or reasources we provided them at the end of the flow.

My Process

  • Research: Understand the Mortgage field and loan types
  • Persona Building: Are we asking the right questions in the flow?
  • Start Designing: Wireframing to High Fidelity Concepts to Prototyping
  • UX Check: What would help our users?
    • Auto progression for single select answers to help keep users moving through the question flow.
    • Only have "continue" buttons when needed, like when a user needs to type out an answer.
    • Progress bar at the top shows users how far they are from completing the flow.
    • Provide moments of education that could help the user as they answer a question.
    • Loading screen with the process of what's currently happening to provide transparency to the user.
  • Work with Product Managers and Engineers on implementation and project phasing: From file hand off to refining the tickets to pre-UAT to QA & End-to-End Testing