Case Study:
Loan Offer Selection Experience
Design Completed: May 2023
Tech pickup: July 2023
2023 // Rocket Companies
My Role // Staff Experience Designer
Design:
Myself (Staff UX), Jose Ortega (Associate UX Designer), Natalie Nichols (UX Writer)
Research:
Alex Panganiban, Dan Van Vleck, Myself
Product/Business:
Matt Merrick, Jay Stephens, Ma Yang, Jamie Tann
Tech Rep:
Leah Stickney
The Problem
Personal Loan applicants experienced over 20 options at the most critical moment – the offer page.
With so many offers to sort through, the page is overwhelming to clients when deciding which to select. Due to this overload, the current selection rate was at 22% from the offers screen.
The Vision
Our ultimate vision is to capture an ideal flow from the beginning application for a Personal Loan through the end validation and closing experience with Rocket Loans.
Starting with the offers experience, after the applicant has started the pre-qualification process, we aimed to improve the offer page by reducing the number of offers shown up front, provide the most important loan offer information up front, and provide methods for them to explore what’s available for them.
Business Goals
✅ Increase offer approval by 20%, from offer selection to approval.
✅ Improve conversions by 20% reducing confusion on the next step with any offer chosen.
User Goals
✅ Reduce cognitive overload with less offers up front.
✅ Add clarity to the experience by surfacing the most important primary information first.
✅ Providing clear expectations on their next steps and what’s involved in the rest of the process.
Onboarding
I came on to the team as they were learning about the needs and requirements to redesign the full personal loan process, so this was a perfect time for me to understand the application process as a whole.
Understanding the full experience allowed me to dive into the current experience today and our teams’ goals to improve this.
- Application – Initial information gathering from applicant and initiating a soft credit pull.
- Offers – Produce qualified loan amount to applicant with available terms, discounts, and payments.
- Verification – Rocket verifies bank info, income, additional documentations and identification, as well as payment method.
- Closing – Fees are paid and further documentation and signing is buttoned up.
- Funding – Client received funds within 1-2 days.
Baselining the Experience
Before diving into designs, a design team member had conducted a usability study on the current application process and offers experience in Rocket Loans.
The team was able to walk away with high-level things that are working in the experience and pain points from this feedback.
Early Takeaways
We were able to compile these takeaways for both experiences and captured ideas and assumptions on how we can begin iterating on an updated offers flow.
- Reduce overall amount of offers shown
- Ability to adjust loan amount
- Showing suggested offers versus the best rate or payment
- Filtering or sorting
- Explore comparison views
Design Updates
We were able to compile these takeaways for both experiences and captured ideas and assumptions on how we can begin iterating on an updated offers flow.
- We introduced a prequalified amount screen with the opportunity to input a desired amount, since this isn’t currently offered in the application, today.
- Explored top two offers, based on the two terms Rocket offers (36 or 60 months).
- Offered the ability to filter in more offers with a “see similar offers” action.
- Introduced certain data in the offer card to explain payoff, fees, and amount in pocket.
Areas to Test
- Comparison between the current offers page and our new design (more vs. less).
- Reactions to a pre-qualified amount screen, before viewing offers.
- The hierarchy presented to applicants on the redesigned offers page.
- Do testers understand how to view more offers? How to sort or filter?
Round 1 Results
Check out the full testing plan and results
Design Updates
With our first test completed, we began to implement the feedback into a second iteration to test on, focusing more on the new experience and the usability.
Main design updates:
- A step for the applicant to select a factor (best rate, lowest payment)
- Simplified cards with clearer hierarchy
- A panel for clients to explore more offer options
Key Areas to Test:
- Full usability of the entire flow from application to offer selection
- Tasks to prompt them to talk through the amount they’d move ahead with, how they would view more information, and filter to see more results.
Round 2 Results
Big Win
❌ Testing the original/current offers experience, only 30% of participants would move forward with an offer presented.
✅ In our new flows, that comfort-level to move forward with an offer increased to 80% selection rate.
Check out the full testing plan and results
Final Designs and Review
After testing we started our final hifi’s to for our final review process with our legal and tech partners.
Key Updates
- Removed factor selection – we wanted to avoid anyone arriving to only one offer, so we removed the best rate and lowest payment selection in the earlier screens.
- Details in Offers – Updated the wording under the details panel to be clearer and less confusing, Money in Pocket changed to Money in Your Account, and we removed Total Payoff.
- Customization Tool – We kept the customize panel visible on mobile, but treated it as an anchor link to a section with fields, making this section more discoverable upon scrolling.
- What to Expect – With this mentioned before the application process and on our page, we kept this section simple and removed from the loading experience.
- Loading experience – shortened to only show inform the client what’s happening in the back-end, this shred a few seconds from the overall animation, since the offers may generate in 3-4 seconds.
- Contact/Faq – opted for a simplified contact section, pulled from the Rocket Design System.
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