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Chase Home Lending

Helping New Homebuyers

Calculate Affordability

Role: Designer (UX + Visual) at HUGE

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Challenge

Educate new homebuyers by elevating content and redesigning tools on the Chase Home Lending site

Chase Home Lending has the content, tools, and resources to help new home buyers make homebuying decisions but their platform was suffering from declining engagement and the current design left users feeling overwhelmed and confused. 

Working within a small team at HUGE, I was tasked to design the product vision.

User Research

Understanding user needs and exploring through interviews, research, and data

Out of the 60 million customers Chase customers, 30 million of them have mortgages but only 5 million people have mortgages with Chase. That's only 8%. 

Our persona, Kate, was the agreed upon target customer because she was Chase customer and first time homebuyer but did not have a Chase mortgage.

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User research allowed us to narrow in on a few key themes for product exploration.

  • How might we make the CHL more customer-oriented?
    The current site focused more on 'product offerings' rather than how Chase's services could help the customer. 
     

  • How might we make the site easier to navigate?
    Customers were overwhelmed and confused by the site architecture.
     

  • How might we empower users with educational content and tools? 
    In order to better serve customer needs, we needed to surface helpful tools like the Mortgage Learning Center, tools and calculators and place them in context with related content.

Redesigning the Affordability Calculator

Market Research: Redesigning the Affordability Calculator

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One of the biggest pain points for users was not understanding all the costs involved in buying a home — which is more than just the mortgage. Chase's Affordability Calculator aimed to assist homebuyers in determining their budget but there were opportunities to improve the tool.

I did a competitor analysis to thoroughly understand the inputs and outputs of calculators across the board to understand the gaps and opportunities to consolidate and improve the tool.

Before: Affordability Calculator

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After: Affordability Calculator

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I proposed a visual system to cue when a user's entered info fell within or outside their budget. Scrubbing the lever either increased or decreased the housing price and therefore also the breakdown of the monthly payment.

A a breakdown of all the expenses could be found another level deeper.

Interactive

Chart

Putting all the costs together, step by step

Before: Understanding the Cost of Home Ownership

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After: Understanding the Cost of Home Ownership

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I proposed to transform the chart around understanding the cost of your mortgage to an interactive tool so users could select the expenses they were incurring throughout the process.

In order to do this, I proposed a new UX model as well as a re-ordering of the content and added a 'How Much' for every 'What.'

Mad Libs Calculator

Mad Libs Calculator

Before: Calculating DTI

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After: Before: Calculating DTI

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Another example of where I brought the content to life in a new way was with the Mad Libs calculator, which broke down what a Debt-to-Income ratio is.

 

This proposed change allows users to educate themselves, by learning the financial lingo through doing and applying the equation to their personal financial situation.

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