Mortgage Calculator
Our objective was to create a dynamic mortgage calculator experience that could guide users to the right next action depending on their individual home buying needs.
Aligning on a personal experience
Our research uncovered that users that visit our calculator are in various stages of the home buying process. Many users submitted the original calculator upwards of 7 times, which signaled to us that users wanted to experiment with a range of home prices and down payments, and didn't have a specific home in mind quite yet. Other users were further along in their home buying journey and were looking to get pre-qualified by a lender. The original experience was purely a calculator with a generic rate table underneath.
We wanted to make sure our experience met our users where they are in their home buying process. For users that are just starting to explore what they can afford, we wanted to guide them to educational content on the home buying process. For folks in their search, we may populate home listings in their calculator ZIP code around the price point they are considering, to give a sense of what type of home they can afford. For users that are ready to get a mortgage or get pre-qualified, we should show them the best possible rates for their particular search.
The team's solution
Engagement / Gamify
We gamified the calculator, leaning in to the behavior that we were seeing where users were filling the calculator out multiple times. This included slider inputs for home value, a two-way calculation so a user could either dictate the home value or the monthly payment they could afford, and a fun animated house illustration that evolved as the user input different home values.
Simplify
This is Bankrate's top trafficked page. Pulling in millions of visitors daily, though direct monetization is low. Over time, SEO and other teams added elements to push monetization, but the users didn't want this. Upon extensive user testing, it was found that minimizing the distractions and prioritizing the calculator itself, increased trust and lent itself to a 50% user return rate.
Change of approach
The focus is now on capturing the users when they are low intent, and keep them coming back until they are high intent.
We also wound up proving an increase in qualified leads for our partners (because we weren't sending them people that weren't actually ready to buy yet). This was a significant business win.
The finished product
