Project 3

Project overview

Project type: Re-design home loan application
Role: UX Lead
Timeline: 4Quarters
Partners: Legal, Engineering, Product, Design Research, Content Strategy, Loan Officers, Data Science
Outcome: Home loan application added to the Home Loan Center

Platform: Web and Mobile Web

Goal

Replace third party software (Blend) and empower our customers to navigate the Loan application experience more independently, with great confidence and with less errors..

We want our customers to be able to go through an entire application on their own (if they choose).

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Challenges

Limited options in customizing the user experience of Blend
Blend cannot remember previous Zillow Home Loans interactions
Can not provide accurate and specific status of their progress due to lack of backend data access

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Design Process

This is the process that we followed as a team to deliver the final designs:

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Discover Phase: Personas

Beth: First time home buyer
Brandon: Shopping partner and Co-borrower on loan

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Define Phase: Design Brief

I drafted a design brief to get alignment with stakeholders on design expectations

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How users gets into the funnel

This is how a Beth would get into our funnel to get pre-approved.

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Areas of focus

For this project, I focused on completing and submitting a pre-approval form.

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Concept Phase: Tenants and Traps

These are list of common usability traps we found when we did an audit of the current experience.

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Trap 1: System Amnesia

Tenant: Efficiency

Def: They system re-prompts the user for information it previously gathered, or otherwise fails to leverage the user’s prior work.

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Trap 2: Un-comprehended Element

Tenant: Efficiency

Def: A cue (label, icon, affordance, or prompt) critical to achieving a goal is noticed, but its meaning, or the required method interaction with it, is unclear.

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Other Traps

Irreversible Action: The system does not allow the user to undo an action they have taken.
Variable Outcome: The system responds differently at different times to the same user action.
Unwanted Disclosure: The system makes the user’s data or behavior public in a way that is harmful or embarrassing to the user.

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End to End flow

To better understand what was happening throughout the process. I crafted a flow which showed user actions as well as operator actions. This was used as a communication tool to get alignment with stakeholders

Explorations

Design Phase - 1

Early designs modeled after Rental team"s landlord tool. We had to move away from this initial design as it did not successfully track context for users. (users needed to know where they were in the process and).

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Design Phase - 2

Explored having qualifying questions before filling out the Pre-approval form These questions were later moved to the onboarding section.

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Design Phase - 3

Exploring fine details, like use of buttons. We ended up going with the right option because it clearly communicated.

Final Designs

We ended up going for solid buttons that highlighted clear CTAs but at the same time communicate progress.

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Outcomes

Increased completion rate of application by 35%: successfully launched and implemented

Influenced other application flows at Zillow: rentals application

Project inspired a new initiative for a Celebratory Success States Framework

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