Bankrate Homes
Having already built a best-in-class mortgage loans experience, it only makes sense to take advantage of that, and capture the entire home buying experience by providing a full service home search
Where do we start?
With the huge impact that this effort will not only take on our team, but on the website itself (seo impact), we wanted to make sure that we were always 10 steps ahead of every step along the way.
Competitive landscape
What are our competitors doing? What are they doing well? What are they doing not-so-well? There are so many best-in-class competitors doing this already, so it made our lives "slightly" easier when user testing and identifying personas.
User testing
We believe in proving through data and not with our "guts". Though I like to encourage "gut" and "instinct", it's a WHOLE LOT EASIER to convince senior leadership that this is the better approach based on actual data. 75% of our user bank aligned on these patterns and 80% flagged these issues from our competitors as roadblocks, or added friction to the over-all experience.
Wireframing concepts
Based on the testing data and brainstorming takeaways from our co-creation sprint, we then can move into wireframing out the experience. I am a FIRM believer in my team not jumping immediately into high fidelity design. Working in wireframes allow you to focus on the UX and not be distracted by the make-up on the mannequin.
Without getting too process heavy...
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We go through a few rounds of wireframes, and voting.
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When we are ready, we send our wireframes through a round of user testing
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Then we present the "iterated" wires (based on testing) to leadership and engineering (to flag any technical or business roadblocks)
Final visuals
You will see "a few" similarities to our competitors in this final design. And that is "by choice". Like I said, there are many best-in-class and certain patterns are tried and true (and tested very well). But where we started standing out was in the education and hollistic "home buying journey". Elements that not only give the user an excellent home search, but also an education along the way. Being sure to tie in our mortgage rate match, our best-in-class calculators, award winning articles, and more!
