Most first time homebuyers believe that the lower the interest rate is the better a mortgage loan offer is. While the interest rate is a large part of what matters, the lowest does not equate to being the best.
Own Up’s mortgage offers are usually within the 90th percentile, i.e. better than the general market most of the time but our customers didn’t think so.
To understand why, I coalesced internal sales & customer success feedback along with talking to customers who did not move forward with us to understand why this was happening.
With this process, I discovered an opportunity for Own Up to educate customers, differentiate itself from competitors and add on to it’s credibility by creating an offer comparison tool.
What do people think about our offers today?
- Our main user drop-off was due to the perception that our offers are not competitive or good. Many assumed that looking at rates is enough
- Mortgage offers have a reputation for being confusing and complex to understand.
Our experience was lacking context and education on how to look for a good offer.
- Many of our customers had expressed a desire to be able to compare offers to our home advisors.
- Some of our customers made their own complex calculators and maintained manual records of different offers to compare them.
- Some of our customers expressed the need for an informative experience on looking for a good offer. They wanted some analysis to be presented to them, so they could take a well-rounded decision on their mortgage.
- A huge pain point for our customer’s was figuring out an alignment between the ideal mortgage offer and their personal finance goals. For example, some people want better overall savings while some are looking for lower monthly installments.
How do we communicate the competitiveness of our offers in an unbiased way to build trust, whilst educating first time homebuyers of what makes a good offer?
The industry-wide narrative and common marketing is all about low interest rates. We wanted to add nuance to that and make our consumers think about their personal financial goals through comparisons. I did some further digging:
To shift the narrative on offers — I collected information from our Customer Success team to figure out some important costs, points, credits and timelines people asked for or were guided on when comparing offers:
- Breakeven
- Life of the loan
- Low monthly payments
- Net Lender Fees
I conducted a competitive audit — did they have something similar? How did they approach it?
- Most of these workflows were separate from the rates page, and still required manual inputs
- Some of the analyses were visually complex — even for our expert home advisors to understand
Ideating on building a comparison workflow
One of our goals was making discovery and activation the comparison tool very simple. So, I strategized on a user flow that focused on creating a low barrier to entry to get into the the tool.
Wireframing key stages
The user flow planning led me to define 3 key stages in the comparison shopping tool including;
1. Activation,
2. Selecting comparable offers
3. Generating analyses based on goals.
I conceptualized and developed wireframes using these key stages.
Validating our assumptions
Through iterative feedback sessions with Product Development & Engineering, we were able to pull scope & requirements. Once we were confident to launch, we conducted testing sessions from 1:1 user interview & prototype sessions.
Based on the feedback, we were able to validate our core idea, and adjust the experience to finally set it up for launch.
Comparison Shopping
Discoverable & intuitive to mental models
The best way to prove how good something is through comparison. Humans are naturally wired to compare things when they don’t have a concrete picture of what they want. This was the intent behind a simple entrypoint using the Compare button.
Placing it on our rate table (on desktop sizes) & rate cards (on mobile sizes) worked out successfully. During initial launch — more than 200 comparisons were generated across a 5-day period.
Optimized for personal financial goals
Our customers come with different goals in mind to find their perfect offer. Sometimes, people do not have these goals in mind and they don’t know what to look for. Keeping these points in mind — we developed the back-end calculation to display different types of goals in our analyses
Differentiation through education
The primary objective of this workflow was to help people compare different Own Up offers and discover a great deal.
We also saw an opportunity to educate people by giving them the option to upload their Loan Estimate from another lender or service. Though the comparison would be manually done by a home advisor — it would become a way to interact with the customer — and truly let them know which one was the better deal.
This was a win-win — if Own Up has the better deal — the customer would more likely move forward with us. If the outside deal is better — we would notify the user — establishing trust and brand recognition.
What I Learned
We plan to let customers generate comparisons between more than 2 offers in the next phase of Comparison Shopping. I’ll be working on that next!