FinLocker is a white label financial fitness platform that is designed to help first time home buyers prepare for buying a home. It also is a way to increase engagement between lenders and prospective customers. I was asked to take ownership of one of the primary functions of the platform, the readiness assessment. I worked primarily on the web designs but also gave thought to mobile as well.
Visual Design, Research Analysis, Design Strategy, Wireframing, Prototyping.
Worked on a team with a Product Owner, several developers and QA Engineers. I reported to the SVP of Product and worked closely with another UX designer and Product Owner.
The design process was a little bit different for this project since this was an existing product that was getting a major overhaul as opposed to a new product. In the current state, users would link different pieces of financial data into their "locker" and it would give them insights on what kind of home loan they would qualify for. Since it was a startup and the design function was new, I was one of the first UX Designers to work with the readiness tool.
Initially, I was asked to put forward a few concepts so I made a few simple wireframes to understand the product better, since I had just started working on it.
My first designs looked something like a setup wizard with a column on the left showing the steps and a large space on the right. This would allow for lots of content to be included that would educate users on the in's and out's of buying a home as well as how to use the tool. Initially, I thought that this would address a user that was very new to the home buying process with a goal to learn as much as they could.
Talking it over with the SVP of Product, we decided that while helpful, it was a lot to show someone and there were already many resources available to educate first time home buyers. The primary goal would be to help users understand the tool and see the value prop. I decided to make a goal that users would be able to understand the tool in less than 30 seconds and use it to some degree of usefulness in less than 1:30.
My approach to this on my second design was to keep the two columns. On the left would be five user inputs that would be static. On the right, would be the mortgage readiness report. As users imputed their data on the left it would populate the report and users could immediately see the value of the tool. I was hopeful that this design would help users see the ease and effectiveness of the tool.
One of the challenges that I faced in the UI design was that in the new iteration of this tool, users would be able to self report all of the data. In previous versions, users would link financial accounts, enroll in credit monitoring, etc and that was what was used for the report.
By allowing users to self report this made it so that they could quickly get an estimate and if they knew their financial situation was changing or different in some way they could adjust on their own to get a more accurate picture. This feature was helpful for users but for the loan officers that were using this to help people close on a loan it was not. They needed actual verified info in order to complete a deal and a user could enter whatever info they wanted.
To solve these in this iteration I made a different UI for self reported info vs verified info. The verified info has a certified check. Users who used self reported info would feel some sense of completion but there would be additional sense of completion upon having verified info.
I also added a message that displayed right before a user saw the mortgage report that explained what the report did and didn’t do and gave a prompt to link financial data.
In order to validate this design, I created an unmoderated test. Even though the results of the test were mostly positive. I talked more with the SVP of Product. Having the two columns that updated the report in real time was a nice feature and highlighted the value proposition of the tool, it was still overwhelming. Also, it would be very difficult to translate to mobile, which was the plan eventually. Ultimately I was able to choose the two columns or a more simple design. I decided that given the importance of making a stress free experience it was more important to err on the side of simplicity in order to create a better customer experience.
For my next design, I kept the five questions on their own page. Users would be able to see all of them at the same time so they knew the level of effort required. Then on the next page they would see their readiness report. I decided that instead of having a goal of understanding in 30 seconds, I would have a goal of completing the 5 questions in 30 seconds. With something this simple a user could quickly put in some numbers, even fake ones, and see what happened. I have found that a user will understand the value of a tool more by trying it out than reading why or how they should use it. Once they understand, they can then go back, enter different info or ideally link their financial info so that it is verified.
To accomplish the goal of having a user be able to answer the five questions quickly, I needed to make sure that they were easy to understand. Also, a user would need to be able to give a ballpark estimate. I found that at Finlocker, there were many people that had been around the mortgage industry for a while and had more advanced financial knowledge. I wanted to make sure that there were no assumptions being made as to financial literacy of the average user. I ran an unmoderated test to see:
1. Do users understand what is being asked for each question?
2. How confident are users to be able to give an estimate for each question?
I was pleased to find that nearly 100% of users understood the question. As far as being able to give a good estimate, users rated their confidence an average of 4 out of 5 or greater. This led me to believe that we were on the right track. I wasn’t able to but as a followup test, I would have liked to ask users to use the tool as they normally would and see how close to the 30 seconds I was.
Now that I knew the structure of the tool and the five questions that would be asked I worked with the Product Owner and the Tech Lead to come up with a plan for implementation. There were a lot of backend changes that needed to be made so we would release the updates in phases. The first phase would simply rearrange the backend and the frontend would change the smallest possible amount. This meant that the design needed to stay simple and I would have to hold off on additional features. Just as we were about to move forward, our SVP of Product unexpectedly went on medical leave and we did not know when she would be back. She had questions about whether or not we were meeting customer needs before leaving so I didn’t feel like we should move forward with the changes and yet I didn’t want to hold things up.
With her absence, I took the opportunity to better understand the user by reviewing previous user research. We had a backlog of interviews that I went back and watched and took notes on. I arranged my notes into two empathy maps along with an archetype. One for a first time home buyer who was greater than 18 months from buying a home and one for a first time home buyer that was 6-18 months from buying a home.
I also created a customer journey map for the readiness tool. This was also helpful in another problem that came up. As we got closer to implementation, I noticed there was a lack of communication and documentation on what was being built and why. There was confusion on what features were being built when and the mobile designs and web designs were looking very different. My hope was that understanding the user and aligning to a journey map would be helpful but I also made a user flow for version one of the readiness tool that I hoped would clarify and again, bring alignment.
It was after this that the company experienced some financial trouble and I was no longer able to work on the project. To my knowledge it is still being built.
The next thing that I would have wanted to work on is to complete the different phases of version one and then I had started working on a reward system for users. The thing that I enjoyed most about this project was listening to users talk about their experiences in interviews. I saw the struggle for first time home buyers, especially in this market, and I really believed that I could give a tool to help.
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