HashChing Website Redesign

HashChing is an online platform for a network of mortgage brokers who advertise their home loan deals from a panel of 80+ lenders. Since their launch in 2015, HashChing have had a healthy number of visits and have settled over 1 billion worth of home loans over 3 years, but with certain changes in the industry had led to customers being more skeptical of smaller companies. Up until this point HashChing had been putting the most focus on adding more features and updates for broker usability and this left the lead (borrower) numbers to fall. Due to this, a solution was needed fast.

Discovery

As a two person design team(Product designer, UX designer) we shared duties in the first phase. The first phase consisted of drawing up on current Sitemaps, customer journey, competitor analysis, stakeholder feedback, data insights, and setting out tasks for the user interviews.

Define

To recruit participants for testing I contacted customers from the HashChing database as well as home loan facebook groups. In the first round we had completed around seven (one-on-one) user interviews and three phone interviews. During the testing we managed to use both desktop and mobile designs as well as competitors web sites to discover what was working and what wasn’t. 

By the second day of testing we had designed a new prototype (using Invision) to test out based on the feedback from the first day…..after one or two sessions I tweaked the prototype based on feedback and the process went on like this for the next day of testing. 

Develop

With our new insights, and a basic slightly tweaked prototype we conducted workshops using empathy maps and crazy eight excercises to spark new ideas into our new customer journeys, sitemaps and updated prototype. Knowing that customers all had different motifs and experience in the home loan search I created a number of alternative funnels in the prototype. 

Customers that:

• Have just started their research 
• Wanted to speak to a broker for advice
• Wanted to find a lower interest rate (includes Refinancing customers)

Being also the copywriter for the project this also played a challenge. The aim was to create simple content, no jargon and enough information to help customers understand our service. Creating copy assisted my development of funnel wireframes, knowing when to add in helpful guides and assure the customer through the journey.

The Realtimeboard app became my most used tool throughout the project. Mapping out all feedback notes onto journeys, sitemaps and designs. This also helped alot with an overseas development team on how to build the designs by clearly connecting each interaction to its destination with arrows and comments.

Delivery

After weeks of designing it was time to use the new designs for a final round of user interviews to see if the product improved. In these interview sessions we were able to confirm if the previous issues were resolved and if customers were more comfortable in trusting the brand.

Finalising Design and final thoughts

The last week was spent finalising the visual design (Sketch app), ensuring consistency in typography, and components throughout the journey. My aim was to create a simple and clean look and feel to lean away from looking to ‘Too wordy’ and ‘Salesy’. Another thing to note is the trend of the overuse of illustrations in most websites to date, I felt for a home loan company it was necessary to keep the use of photography with a mix of product UI to help build a balance of trust and a reminder we are a technology based financial company. All final designs were uploaded to Zeplin for development.

Currently the product is in development and will be launched mid February 2018.

More to come in late February 2019