Want to get a mortgage? Are you a millennial?

4 min readSep 30, 2019

Mortgauge can help!

Thinking about the future is always overwhelming & confusing, but getting a mortgage shouldn't be. There is no formal teachings or lessons given for the youth to become more financially independent. But there's always a way!

Solution

Mortgauge is a hybrid of real estate experience & tech. Almost like an all-in-one solution for anyone. It offers multiples resources like tools, processes and most importantly a real estate experience & mortgages.

Our scope for this project was to create a better design experience for those who want a mortgage(s) & give them a better service.

Research

To get the design matched to what the users would want, we surveyed 15 people, got their opinions on how they feel about the mortgage process and what they would like to have when it came to the process of buying a home, whether its for investment or for themselves.

“The process is too confusing!”

The key insights from the research were:

Based on the research, we saw that Users would like to transition to using an online mortgage system versus speaking to someone in person about mortgages & getting a mortgage.

We wanted to keep in mind these key insights when designing the website to enhance the user experience (ex. such as, Found the process confusing/overwhelming & Learnt better through step by step tutorial).

From there we went to create our User Personas, the more we can synthesize out of the research, the more tailored our design can be.

User Stories

Potential users who would be using Mortgauge based off of the research we had conducted.

Sarahs pain points:

new to the game — need more information
not entirely sure about the process of mortgages & buying homes

Mimis pain points:

doesn't know where to start
likes a more simplified process of calculating rates & percentages

Johns pain points:

save money on the process so he can invest more
ease the process of finding a realtor & mortgage broker — so he can get back to what he does on his free time

Prioritizing features

Knowing what each users pain points were, within the sprint of the project, we were able to prioritize what's important and how to solve these problems.

We concluded on creating an engaging and informative homepage and creating better-designed tools, considering these are the selling points of Mortgauge.

We went into the design phase of the project, where we put our creativity to the test.

How do we make finding a mortgage interesting & better for the user?

Design

create a trustworthy, comfortable and knowledgeable experience for the user, with an open & clean design — eliminating confusion & sense of overwhelm

Starting off with low-fis seemed like the best fit when it came to creating a responsive website for Mortgauge, considering the amount of information and knowledge needed to create mortgages, low-fis were constantly being altered in order to simplify the step-by-step process of the tools.

mid-fis also was one of the most difficult phases for this project, different opinions, need to get the testing done from all ranges of people, some who have little, those who have intermediate and lastly those that have advanced knowledge on the mortgage processes

Old vs New

Once done with testing, Hi-fis were completed by the UI team, to make sure that the colors & emotion we depicted from the mood board are being shown through.