Rocket Companies
Property Report
Created a product for homeowners to track the value of their home and housing market conditions.
Business goal
Create a tool to drive traffic to mortgage and refinance products by presenting users with information on the status of the market in their area, and their homes current value.
Role
Research, architecture, and design
Team
1 Product manager
1 Product designer
Acquired more accurate data vendor
Improved engagement by 33%
Design & validate
The challenge
Using available market data we created early prototypes to test with home owners. We quickly found that the information shown was overwhelming to users, and paused the study.
We revisited the designs by mapping user goals to information and were able to reduce the page by half, and retested.
Findings
Users felt the information provided could help with their decision to buy a new home or refinance their current home.
Users were surprised by the amount of public information about their home.
Users wanted more information such as crime and school ratings.
Next steps
We refined the designs based on findings and handed them off to development.
Data quality concerns
The challenge
The team had concerns about the data quality of the tool due to an existing vendor. To evaluate data quality, I conducted an internal employee survey and unmoderated usability test with home owners looking to sell.
Findings
Data quality was low. With many of the live test participants unable to complete their tasks due to data being unavailable.
Some survey participants mentioned similar issues, but occurrences were small.
Many participants questioned the data quality and wanted to understand how the information was populated.
Even with the data quality issues, there was much positive feedback, showing a desire for the tool.
Next steps
The team investigated the data issues for several months, but at some point priorities shifted, and the project was left live without updates.
“I like how direct and focused on the concept of selling this report is. Makes me think about being a power user selling my house rather than just lead generation. It informs and educates, not just draws me in.”
“Awesome tool. Love the clarity and thorough information.”
One year later …
During prioritization, Property Report was flagged for decommissioning due to low engagement. I proactively reviewed past research, analytics, and surveys to uncover missed opportunities.
Analytics deep dive
The challenge
There was a miss match between business analytics and prior research. By evaluating analytics I found that only 15–20% of users saw the full experience, and those users were five times more likely to engage than those who didn’t. After one year, this represented a missed opportunity to reach over a million users.
Findings
We identified the following problems that needed new designs to be created for the page to properly load:
Legal restrictions varied state to state, and some states did not allow our data to be publicly viewed.
Some homes appeared without attributes (beds, baths, sq feet), a flaw in our data provider, which caused data not to load.
Next steps
Using the findings I created eight new design variations that once implemented would dramatically increase information shown to the user, therefore improving clickthroughs and engagement.
Product managements takeaway was to evaluate the data vendor to identify if a new vendor would better meet our needs as a company.
Impact
The evaluation of the data provider led to the acquisition of a new vendor with higher quality data for across the company.
We went up to an 80 - 90% load rate allowing almost all users to see the available data leading to a consistent 33% increase in engagement with the experience.
The increase in engagement led to retaining the product on Rockets website.