A close up photo of a persons hands signing papers.

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

  • 1.17% 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 statistics

  • 12.8% 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

Outcome

Down payment card

Down payment assistance modal

Provider results