How I led the design process of digitalizing Ratehub's mortgage application from concept to ship.
For years, Ratehub.ca has been a marketplace where users can compare mortgage rates from many providers in one place. However, once users are ready to apply, they get directed to Ratehub's brokerage partner. This resulted in a fragmented user experience.
Ratehub.ca wanted to invest in a one-stop experience that enable users to research, compare and apply for a mortgage. I was part of the core team to deliver this vision.
The result was an MVP that tied together Ratehub.ca's mortgage rates comparison experience and its brokerage services from start to approval.
When the MVP flow went live to 2,000 users in the first month, stakeholders were delighted that we delivered an on-par completion rate and did not receive any bad customer reviews. Since then, the flow has helped over 11,000 Canadians secure their mortgages since 2022.
With such a huge undertaking, the work began with understanding what we knew so that we could find out what we didn't know. It involved the following research process across teams:
Competitive analysis - Myself & PM
Business and technology audit - Myself, PM, Brokerage team, Developers, CEO, CTO
User research - Myself & Mortgage team designer
Extensive test plan to ensure minimal funnel drop off - PM & Dev with Design support
As we identified that the Core Persona is more likely to use a broker, we decided to choose that as our main persona to design for.
We prioritized the user needs above and started ideating for some solutions.
We added trust messages at key steps of the flow to reassure users that their personal data are safe.
When we collect contact information, only the email was asked at account creation and support text was added to explain why.
After user selected a rate, we clearly laid out the value proposition to start an application.
We sectioned out the questions by type and users could navigate back and forth with a menu on the side.
Answers were automatically saved even if the user did not completely filled out the whole page.
If users needed to get back to it, they could access in-progress applications via a dashboard.
They could always get back to the last place they left off.
Users could book a meeting with agent at any point in the flow
We launched the MVP with 2,000 users in the first month, stakeholders were delighted that we delivered an on-par completion rate and did not receive any bad customer reviews.
As the funnel analysis came in after the launch, we continued to improve Completion and Conversion metrics at every drop off points. Building trust and reducing friction were the continuous themes for our iteration cycles.
My takeaway
User emotions must be handled with care
Of all the product offerings on Ratehub.ca, mortgages application is the most emotional triggering. It's important for design to handle every moment of anxiety with care in order to deliver the best user experience and business results.
Holistic UX-human touch is more important than ever in today's world full of artificial interactions
Technology is taking over a lot of our real world interactions, but the human need for connection will not change even with the advance of AI. None of these features would matter had it not been for our broker agents' impeccable customer service. They were the real MVPs in this MVP.