Wayhome Affordability Check
Wayhome helps individuals buy homes through a shared ownership scheme.
This tool involved a flow centred around customer affordability checks, hosted on the Wayhome platform but powered by a third-party credit reporting agency via APIs.
My roles.
Led and managed the design process.
Worked closely with product managers to identify problems, define the hypotheses, and outline a measurement plan.
Worked with a content designer to fine-tune the copy and ensure the consistency of content across visuals and words.
Paired with developers to understand technical limitations, discuss design, and conduct design QA.
Analysing the context
As part of the process of buying properties with our customers, Wayhome has to run affordability checks to review the financial eligibility of potential customers.
This process was powered by a third-party service provider and happened on their platform.
Understanding the problem
This setup gave us very little control of the user experience. Our operational team was spending a lot of time triaging customer issues that we were unable to mitigate or prevent.
After having conversations with stakeholders and users involved in the current Affordability Check process, a diagram was drawn. I then shared this with the product team to provide context and facilitate a discussion.
Defining the hypotheses
We hypothesised that migrating the affordability check to the Wayhome platform would improve the customer experience. It would also give us more visibility over where customers may be dropping off due to friction in the buyer journey.
Finally, we assumed that a better customer journey should increase the number of customers who complete this step unaided, ultimately reducing operational time.
Drawing user flow and wireframes
Since we did not have much visibility over the user experience or the overall process performance, the team wanted to roll out the first version as an MVP as soon as possible.
The purpose of this was to gather user behaviour insights and test the API integration with the third-party provider.
Approaching the design
Based on the previous research, we knew that users were often sceptical about this flow since it required access to their banking app. Our customers are also not the most tech-savvy users, and if they struggle to complete the flow unaided it would burden the operational team.
To tackle that, the design needed to be trustworthy, simple, and clear.
Following up post-launch
Four weeks following release, we saw an 34% increase in customers completing the process and moving on to the next step in the funnel. The updated flow also reduced the amount of time the operational team spent on supporting customers by 72%.
However, besides the positive impact, we also saw that 30% of the users didn’t connect all of their bank accounts, despite us highlighting the need for this in the copy. When digging deeper, we learnt that this was because users often didn’t remember their less frequently used accounts.
The next version will tackle this problem.