Home Equity Process & Application Improvements

Company/ Capital One

Role/ Research Lead & User Experience Designer

Responsibilities

  • Research/ plan development, execution, analysis and reporting.

  • Design/ wireframes, defining user requirements, and visual design.

Team/ 1 Product Manager, 1 User Experience Designer, 1 Research Coordinator

Opportunity/ Capital One faced low engagement from in-branch employees of the home equity product due to dissatisfaction with the existing experience.

Goal/ Understand process and pain points of in-branch employees to increase adoption and sales.

Impact/ Shifted from in-person to a self-service online tool, resulting in a significant drop in application abandonment and a 3x increase in conversion.

In-branch interviews

Goal/ Understand in-branch employees processes, needs, and pain points.

Research approach/ Conducted in-person interviews and contextual inquiry (side-by-sides) with 14 in-branch bank employees across 3 states.

Findings

  1. Inconsistent loan process and underwriting communication led to duplicative document requests and client frustration.

  2. The existing application, tailored for mortgages, did not meet the needs of home equity customers, resulting in low-quality applications.

  3. Branch employees felt inadequately trained to sell complex home equity products, and often deferred to simpler options like credit cards.

Next steps

  1. I collaborated with stakeholders to analyze findings as a team to build a shared understanding of user needs across roles.

  2. Using the analysis I created personas and journey maps for in-branch employees, highlighting their home equity processes and pain points.

Outcome

Using the research outputs, Capital One decided to remove home equity from in-branch product offerings. Instead, home equity clients were directed to a specialist hotline, which freed up bankers to support clients with other tasks.

Our new direction

Now that in-branch employees had been removed from the home equity process, we changed our direction to an online consumer facing home equity application.

Exploratory interviews

Goal/ Understand consumer experiences with home equity including their motivations, fears, and application processes.

Research approach/ Conducted in-person interviews with consumers who had obtained a home equity loan, or line of credit, in the last 6 months.

Findings

  1. Users lacked understanding of home equity and its utilization.

  2. Users sought an easy application process with auto-populated information.

  3. Users were hesitant to provide personal information until they were sure about proceeding with a lender.

“What makes me nervous about going online is getting overwhelmed with real estate jargon I don’t understand.”
— User 3

Design & validate

Design approach/ Using our foundational research we collaborated with our product and technology teams to create wireframes for the application. The wireframes would later become high-fidelity designs.

Research approach/ Conducted two rounds of in-person moderated usability tests with consumers who had obtained a home equity loan or line of credit in the last 6 months.

Findings

  1. Users wanted assurance of information security.

  2. There was an inherent trust in Capital One's offerings, but the options needed education and simplification.

  3. Users were overwhelmed by long forms, and instead preferred the application to be broken into smaller question sets.

Outcome & impact

Incorporating the usability findings, the final application was adjusted to meet user needs including:

  1. Automating data collection through a secure, soft credit pull.

  2. Providing in-application education to inform users of their options.

  3. Close analysis of post launch analytics to identify pain points and adjust in the first two months of launch.

The new design was a great success with significant reduction in application drop-off leading to three times application conversion. As well as an award from McKinsey & Company for usability.

  • Personal information

  • Loan selection

  • Debt selection

  • Review