Ally
Mortgage Calculators
I collaborated with an amazing cast of individuals to launch Ally's first mortgage product. A good portion of that project was devoted to creating three mortgage calculators. The lifecycle of this project saw much research, iteration, challenge and testing. I'm happy to say we built some very helpful and intuitive tools for our mortgage customers. Here are a few examples from that process…
Competitive Analysis, Sketch, Whiteboard
In the early phases there was much analysis of competing financial institutions and other industry leaders, like Capital One, Nerd Wallet, Quicken Loans, Etc.
We dug into previous research Ally had done on what our customers were looking for in a mortgage offering and compared that to what the top mortgage companies were offering.
We learned that the top three calculators across the board were affordability, payment and refinance calculators.
A lot of ruff whiteboard sketching of various ideas took place and continued throughout the project. In my opinion the whiteboard (physical or virtual) remains the best way for a creative team to collaborate, especially in the early phases.
Sketch, Wireframe, ideation
My team worked in Sketch and shared ideas fairly quickly because of the versatility of the application.
I enjoy sharing a Sketch document with my visual designer and passing ideas back and forth to keep things moving quickly.
Involving our content strategist in these sessions, allowed for her to see what could and would not work early and allow for large pivots before finding bigger issues down the line.
Occasionally old saved ideas find their way back into the final product, due to saved digital sketch sessions.
Though most of these images are high fidelity, a lot of them were early ideas we pitched to the executive group and several of those ideas never saw the light of day.
You'll begin to see ideas and treatments that prevailed and tested well.
Ideation, Prototype, Testing & Live
Not all treatments tested well, like the placement of APR and Interest Rate and explaining the difference between the two.
Thanks to testing and several iterations, the 3 calculators were in good shape and ready to go to development.
During development, challenges with 3rd party rate data caused us to pivot on a few features.
In the long run those challenges influenced some positive updates that turned out to be helpful and more informative to the customer.
The calculators were a hit with our customers and reviewed well with millennials, even showing up in a spot on Chedder TV.