Overview
Buying a home is hard. There are countless steps, copious amounts of paperwork, and an endless string of obstacles to overcome. The Bankrate Home-buying Journey will transform the home-buying process by guiding users through every step and allowing them to complete essential tasks in one familiar interface. Not only will it be the first end-to-end experience for home-buying, but it was designed to enable other teams on Bankrate to craft a journey for their specific vertical.
Role
Information Architecture
Interaction Design
Visual UI Design
Interaction Design
Visual UI Design
The Problem
Turns out, the only thing harder than purchasing a home is creating a digital experience about the process. Pulling this strategy together was a months-long process that required intense collaboration with stakeholders across various teams, including product, UX Research, creative and editorial.
The biggest challenge was building a journey for a process that's not only complicated but also non-linear?
There's no "right" way to purchase a home.
Some hire Realtors; others fly solo.
Some get pre-approved, others skip the step.
Some get a mortgage; others pay with cash.
To accommodate different preferences and circumstances, our strategy was to build a scalable and flexible framework that enables us to meet users where they are.
In other words, we focused on the bookshelf, not the books.
Fulfilling our brand promise
Bankrate promises to guide users through life's financial journey. We want to make that promise a reality. We started with analyzing our brand promise and honestly asking ourselves, "Do we really guide users?"
The answer was no. Currently we guide users in a very generic way. Yes we have all the resources for guidance like industry leading editorial content, tools, and financial products. But we haven't yet taught users to combine these resources to reach specific goals.
The Solution
So we set out to create an experience that:
1. Walks closely with our users
2. Every step of the way
3. In journeys that guide them to the right financial decision
4. Given their personal situation
5. Leaving them educated, empowered, and trusting in the Bankrate brand.
But where to begin?
Based on macroeconomic trends, buying a home felt like the right first journey to craft. So we ran a co-creation with the Mortgage team to explore the idea...and it got a lot of love.
Getting buy-in
From there, I designed some high fidelity mocks to gain buy-in at business reviews...and we got approval to proceed.
Crafting the content
Buying a home is hard. There are countless steps, multiple paths forward, & unpredictable timelines. How do we create a journey for a complicated, non-linear process? I partnered with my content designer and we tackled this problem in 3 phases:
1. Start with a thesis
The content design team provided an early draft of steps.
2. Stakeholder feedback
We worked with multiple teams, including product and editorial, to validate the steps.
3. User testing
We asked active homebuyers whether our steps made sense and reflected their own journey.
Determining content types
After defining and ordering each of the steps, we needed to figure out what each of them actually entailed.
Behind the scenes
Fulfilling our teams purpose
Our job as the Authenticated team is to enable vertical teams to integrate into our product suite - to help them better achieve their business goals and build relationships with their customers.
So we knew from the start, we had to build this in a scalable systematic way.
We had to build a framework and system that would be content agnostic.
Meaning any vertical could craft a guided journey. Whether it’s buying a home, or getting out of high interest debt. The system and components had to work in a way that wouldn’t be vertical specific.
We had to build a framework and system that would be content agnostic.
Meaning any vertical could craft a guided journey. Whether it’s buying a home, or getting out of high interest debt. The system and components had to work in a way that wouldn’t be vertical specific.
Initial iterations
Testing & iterating
One major insight we discovered during testing is we initially decided to use the most confusing terminology ever. So we decided to get rid of the word "milestone" which was extremely confusing to users and instead decided to just focus on "steps" as being the main pillars of this experience.
Progress on progress on progress
Another insight we discovered during testing is we had too many progress indicators and numbers throughout leading to more confusion than clarity.
Focusing on granular progress
Instead we decided to focus on tracking progress at the task level so users gain a sense of accomplishment.
Exploring UI treatments
Since this experience was going to become a flagship product for the Authenticated experience we explored a few different look and feels that would feel premium and a bit elevated from the rest of the Auth space.
Final Visual UI Design
Future vision
Turn the home buying journey into the single destination for every step of the home buying process. We own and have partnerships with companies to fulfill every step of the home buying process and beyond. The future vision for journeys is to keep iterating and building in integrations where it's a one stop shop for securing a home.
The Impact
Launched in May 2022, we'll monitor engagement and iterate as needed. Other journeys are already in the works. We've built a system that makes it easy for verticals to integrate with the Authenticated experience and are one step closer to fulfilling our brand promise of "Guiding you through life's financial journey."
