Improving an enrollment flow
As lead designer for the Home Loans product at Achieve, my team—a junior designer and UX writer—was tasked with increasing the application's start and completion rates. We moved quickly to deliver an improved experience for our consumers that exceeded business goals.
Increase start and completion rates
Current experience:
- After answering a long series of questions on a partner site, a user arrives on our site where they are required to provide additional, and often redundant, information.
- They then land on a long task list of information to provide.
- The input sections expand inline, creating an overwhelming experience.
Learning from our competitors
8 participants · 1 hr moderated sessions · participants were homeowners actively shopping for a loan
To uncover improvement opportunities, I designed and conducted a research study that compared our current experience and our two main competitors, Figure and Better.
Opportunities identified:
- Address misconceptions and distrust of HELOCs
- Explain why we ask for PII and how we protect it
- Build more trust in our company
- Help answer questions during the application process
- Provide a way for people to see how a loan would impact their overall budget
Aligning business goals with user needs
With a clearer picture of user needs, I focused design efforts on the areas with the highest impact for both consumers and the business:
- Provide more context and info about HELOCs
- Build trust through transparency
- Provide help answering questions
- Provide info about what to expect and next steps
Working with engineering and product, I scoped these into MVP, prioritizing how information is collected. A fifth design focus — provide help outside of the application itself (eg. a budget calculator to show the impact of a loan) — was descoped to keep MVP focused.
Refining the design
We conducted multiple rounds of usability testing.
Key takeaways/design decisions
- Category cards, chunked by topic, tested better than a single long task list.
- Multiple-choice question lists outperformed a single-question-per-screen format.
- Combining a guided experience with a task list view — the trickiest pattern to get right — became the final direction.
Not every idea made it in as planned
Research surfaced four ways to reduce friction and build trust. One was cut after testing, one was scoped down, and two shipped — here's what happened to each and why.
An improved experience
We balanced technical and time constraints to deliver a more usable, elegant experience. A key feature was a new category card pattern, letting users choose a guided path or tackle items in their own order. We also consolidated information collection into a single-screen experience.
Exceeded target goals
This redesign shipped in Q4 2023. We increased the application start rate by 28% and the completion rate by 36%. Achieve Home Loans saw an additional $3.1M in 2024.
