Bankrate - Mortgage Calculator
How might we create a dynamic, educational mortgage calculator.
As the UX Lead, I facilitated a cross-functional Design Sprint and led a team of Product Managements, Engineers, and Designers to rethink the Bankrate mortgage calculator. Bankrate's mortgage calculator has the top spot in search results for many mortgage terms, and therefore is a highly trafficked experience, but didn't drive the number or quality of leads the business wanted it to.
Project Goal
Our objective was to create a dynamic mortgage calculator experience that could guide users to the right next action depending on their individual home buying needs.
Aligning on a personalized experience
Our research uncovered that users that visit our calculator are in various stages of the home buying process. Many users submitted the original calculator upwards of 7 times, which signaled to us that users wanted to experiment with a range of home prices and down payments, and didn't have a specific home in mind quite yet. Other users were further along in their home buying journey and were looking to get pre-qualified by a lender. The original experience was purely a calculator with a generic rate table underneath.
We wanted to make sure our experience met our users where they are in their home buying process. For users that are just starting to explore what they can afford, we wanted to guide them to educational content on the home buying process. For folks in their search, we may populate home listings in their calculator ZIP code around the price point they are considering, to give a sense of what type of home they can afford. For users that are ready to get a mortgage or get pre-qualified, we should show them the best possible rates for their particular search.
Our solution
We aligned on a dynamic solution that served as a hub for multiple user journeys, depending on a user's individual needs. We gamified the calculator, leaning in to the behavior that we were seeing where users were filling the calculator out multiple times. This included slider inputs for home value (and lots of usability testing on them to make sure they were easy to interact with), a two-way calculation so a user could either dictate the home value or the monthly payment they could afford, and a fun animated house illustration that evolved as the user input different home values.
We included pathways for our Mortgage 101 content series for users who weren't ready for rates yet, and a callout to register for the free Bankrate authenticated experience that would allow users to save more intentionally for their home purchase goal.
Results
The result of this experience was an increase in qualified leads for our partners (because we weren't sending them people that weren't actually ready to buy yet), and an increase in registered accounts created within Bankrate. Those accounts represent a valuable retention layer with our users, and the LTV of registered vs annonymous users was a significant business win.
