Down payment assistance programs
Connecting consumers to down payment assistance programs based on their personal financial situation.
Timeline
January 2023 - June 2023
Responsibilities
Senior Product Designer leading brainstorming, ideation, research, and design.
Tools
Figma, usertesting.com, Confluence, Jira
Overview
Consumer pain point
At the end of 2022, the buyer journey began to shift with more consumers delaying home buying because of affordability. Affordability became the top pain point for consumers who were either a first time home buyer or repeat buyer.
Business problem
For the business that operates under a lead-generation model, our consumers were interacting less with our mortgage and lending partners, impacting overall revenue.
Partnership and constraints
Our team worked with existing partnerships like Mortgage Resource Center and formed new partnerships with Down Payment Resource Center.
Highlights
Down payment assistance programs are now shown to consumers for all properties
Impact
12% click-through-rate on down payment assistance call-to-action
23% of visitors completed the down payment assistance program search
15.4% visitors viewed a matched program
Other helpful statistics12.8% lift to click-through-rate to USDA loans
7.37% lift to lead submissions to neighboring call-to-action, USDA loan
7.04% decrease in pre-approval submissions
(No negative impact to pre-approval submissions and media revenue)
Eligibility based on your personal financial criteria
Our recent partnership with Mortgage Research Center allowed us to help consumers understand the dollar amount they could qualify for and the associated providers available to them.
Product experimentation and launches
Overview
Our team took an iterative approach, which included running experiments within production to prove concepts and iterate on current experiences.
Process
January 2023 - June 2023
Down payment assistance integration
Requirements
Hypothesis
If we display links to down payment assistance solutions on the listing details page, then the overall CTR of the financing sections of the LDP will increase because a larger percentage of customers will discover content on the page that can assist them in their home financing journey.
What we want to learn
Measure click-through rate
Click-through rate of at least 0.2% to down payment assistance destination from LDP
Click through rate impact to mortgage pre-approvals
Method
Ideation and collaboration with Lead Product Manager and Lead Engineer
Content design
Product design - Wireframe, low and hi fidelity design
Background
Affordability assistance marketing campaigns
Our marketing team formed a partnership with Down Payment Resource Center to help consumers understand what programs they are eligible for.
With the success of this campaign, we partnered with Down Payment Resource center to integrate this feature into the Mortgage products.
Design process
The product trio (product, engineering, and design) worked together to understand the limitations of the API and how that could influence the flow and what was feasible for the first experiment.
UX flow diagram
Creating a modular design component to use for any mortgage program
The design of the USDA loan card became a foundational component that proved to be modular for any affordability program and special loan program.
Note: During this phase of the project, realtor.com was undergoing a redesign. During this feature's launch, the design organization was using the UI shown here.
User testing for usability and content design
The product trio (product, design, and engineering) partnered with the marketing team to understand the limitations of the API, and the i-frame experience.
With a new feature being added to the existing mortgage products, our research goal focused on the usability of the Figma prototype and content design of the experience.
❌ What’s not working
Sentiment towards program
💡Intresting observation
✅ What’s going well
Prioritizing updates
From the usability study, our team had a list of improvements to make, that spanned multiple sprints.
Now
Next
Later
