My Challenge
To create not just a brand that would evoke feelings of financial empowerment, but also an interactive web-based application that would allow users the ability to take control of their mortgage experience while reducing the intimidation of home-buying.
My Roles
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Lead designer in developing the itsHome brand, feature discovery, creation of the first ever itsHome UI kit, and established the brand guidelines that would influence all marketing channels. Worked closely with DEV and Product to stand up a completely new brand within the mortgage marketplace.
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Orchestrated and organized research projects of all sizes and varying durations since the conception of itsHome. This unmoderated usability testing, user behavior recordings, competitive analysis, and market research, and more.
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Led strategy for our Home Purchase funnels and the itsHome account experience, helping create a revolutionized way to help people buy their first home.
Overview
itsHome mission is simple: To take the complexity out of buying a home while empowering users to take control of their financial future. To accomplish this, the itsHome brand offers a variety of tools, resources, and a personalized app-like logged-in experience that prospective home buyers can use as their one-stop guide to buying their next (or even first) home.
Inventing A Brand
When it comes to the financial technology space, you will often find brands that cater to the transaction instead of the people who use it. With itsHome, I wanted to change that. My goal was to have users imagine that they were comfortably in their dream home and that the stress of the complexity of home buying could just melt away. After laying the research groundwork into everything from logo to colors, it was time to start building the brand.
I achieved this by incorporating:
Calming cool tone color palettes with a splash of warm, motivating orange.
Illustrated iconography that informs but also creates a disarming environment.
Rounded container and button edges to convey a sense of safety and security.
More casual, but affirming, language that speaks to users on a relateable level, making content more digestible than sifting through financial jargon.
An easily recognizable logo that helps users visualize their goals.
With itsHome being a new brand, I had a fresh slate from which to build. It was absolutely paramount that the experience users had on itsHome stood out against the historically bland background of the mortgage marketplace. In order to achieve this, I needed to create a unified user experience ecosystem that provided value at every interaction.
What this UX ecosystem was for itsHome:
An app-like (web-based) personalized logged-in account experience that kept users engaged, interested, and retained.
Calculators, checklists, and wishlists tailored to the user experience on a more personal and relatable level.
Exciting dashboards and data tracking interfaces that are easy to digest and are helpful to the user advancing in their journey.
A united experience across lead-form, logged-in, and learning center interactions.
End-To-End Product Design
When starting from nothing, you can’t start testing or monetizing until you have at least something out in the marketplace. In order to reach itsHome’s “something,” a phased approach was taken to help break into the marketplace more quickly, allow time for user testing, and to adapt to the rapidly changing mortgage marketplace.
Through this approach, we gained the following:
The ability to start analyzing user behavior and conduct usability research earlier on in the development process, which allowed us to adjust design and product strategy for the most impact.
Start generating valuable SEO ranking as early as Alpha.
Allowed our team to make wins more incrementally instead of operating on assumptions which leads to more risk.
An ever-evolving product that better matched the changing environment and emotions of the present home-buying climate.
A Phased Approach to Design
Gamification is more valuable than ever. From social media to fitness tracker apps, it is present in many of our digital interactions to help keep us engaged. We all know that very few people find finances or mortgages “fun,” but itsHome aimed to change just that by:
Creating a step-by-step guide on how to buy a home, that broke down the process into easily-to-follow tasks and action items.
Creating a reward or “celebration” system that played into positive psychology through messaging and animation.
Clear progress tracking that helped not just visualize their goals but actively work to achieve them.
A disarming data input system that made a user’s home buying preferences, wants, needs, as well as personal information, more accessible and organized during their journey (while also gathering valuable data points).