Background
Founded in 2020 Xpanse Inc. is a fast growing startup in the FinTech Mortgage space. Featured in Built In Seattle’s 21 Companies To Watch, Xpanse’s largest client is one of the nation’s top mortgage lenders serving 1.5 million customers with over $300 billion in mortgage loan assets. Xpanse has two sectors of products, B2B and B2C. Each product focuses on providing a better experience that lenders can utilize. Xpanse’s tagline is “Building the modern OS for the greater mortgage industry”
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Top lender
Mortgage technology
My role
Brought on as a Product Designer, Xpanse’s design team has each designer run as head designer for their particular product. I ran point on digital mortgage experience for borrowers, working on digital mortgage applications and any vertical that is borrower facing.
My day-to-day was spent collaborating with key stakeholders, product managers, front-end devs, and other designers creating the best product we could as fast as we could.
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Product designer
Colab w/ large team
Problem
Client wanted a Mortgage Application lead qualification platform whose goal is to convert unqualified leads to qualified leads in preparation for a mortgage application. The idea was to make a form in which the borrower could complete entirely themselves online in less then 5 minutes.
The client was using a short one page form that they would use as a primer for their customer service to manually qualify.
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Qualified leads
5-minute form
Customer service cost
My Process
My user-centered design process is comprised of 5 parts: Discover, Direct, Design, Build, Test. With Design-Build-Test in an ever reoccurring cycle meant to produce the most effective design.
Discover:
To start, we interviewed subject experts at Freedom to gain a deeper understanding of what type of information was needed to qualify a lead. We used these subject matter experts extensively throughout the process to provide sanity checks for how we were approaching solutions. We also gathered many industry insights from a variety of sources in the mortgage technology sector.
Our competitor analysis was focused on understanding how the top digital application loan lenders handled user experience.
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Subject experts
Insights
Direct:
With the information gathered we created personas and customer journeys to inform our mocks. The key here was to define the end goal and metrics in how we would track said goals. These are the documents we used to distill what we found in the Discover stage into actionable deliveries.
Design Direction
Flow fast
People need to be able to jump through and change information fast without being discourage.
Be simple
Decrease distraction by keeping the design simple and clean. Minimal.
Change info if desired
Users may not have all the info at hand; it’s important to allow users to go back to adjust anything.
Co-borrower centric
For borrowers, a home purchase might be the biggest purchase in their life. Uncertainty, anxiety, and distrust can come out when the stakes are this high.
Mobile first
The growing demographic of users using mobile in a home search means more people use mobile over desktop.
Don’t reject
Avoiding negative outcomes is a primary concern for the lender.
Design:
Next was mocks! These mocks were used in key meetings to keep everybody on the same page and uncover possible pain points and avenues of attack that our Front-end and Engineering teams would participate in.
Build:
The project went through many iterations in service of crafting a great MVP.
We created a basic figma prototype that we then tested against users. From there the dev team built a production testing site in which we hammered out any dents or technical challenges.
Test
Using the figma prototype we started more formal user testing/research. The goal of the user research study was to provide a baseline and understanding of the core user pain points, delighters and opportunities in the end-to-end digital mortgage application process that homebuyers (first time buying and refinancing) were experiencing.
Our Approach:
Conduct in-context qualitative deep-dive user interviews with mortgage customers who had recently gone through the online digital experience to get prequalified, preapproved, and applied for a mortgage.
Design strategy
For the MVP we wanted to go for simple, lightweight, and flexible. A mobile-first approach was a major sticking point at the very begining. A balancing act of useful information and streamlined questions was struck. We aligned our questions to fit a user’s exsisting mental model. Careful thought was taken in how incomplete leads were handled and approached. User trust and confidence were our primary drivers in form architecture.
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Lightweight
Trust & Confidence
Impact
Xpanse’s prequalification form had a 90x converstion increase from the old process. We were able to capture 4x more leads then whant was expected. All this while still keeping to the under 5 minute goal for user form completion.
Although version 1 has been a great success, version 2 is currently being designed while being informed by data analysis.
90x
Converstion rate
4x
Lead volume
4.7min
Time to complete