My role here
My role in this project was UX designer, working in partnership with a senior designer colleague. We were given the task to research and design an app that would be pitched to Costco in one of our large quarterly meetings. At the time of building this app I was a new company employee and I was excited about being able to work in such a cool project. Working in collaboration was also really educational for me, allowing me to learn about company regulations and restrictions within our work scopes for the future.
Our challenge
We were asked to build a mortgage calculator app that was simple to use, easy to understand, and packed with user features to help Costco users to quickly run mortgage loan scenarios. Our main goals and objectives were:
Allowing users to store their personal information
Providing quick access to loan amount payments
Customizing our app according to loan purpose
Providing other tools such as budgets and planners
Using our loan pricing engine for live rate quotes
A mortgage app that also provides actual live lending rates from multiple banks.
The Mortgage Calculator
The solution
After a few weeks of research, wireframes, and rough drafts, we built a solid prototype to start user testing. We had limited access to people, as this was pretty hush-hush. However, after receiving feedback, making changes, and iterations, our final product turned out amazing. Our features enabled users to save preferences, make quick changes to loan scenarios, and connect with lenders to actually obtain loans as prices by the app (based on user's accurate personal information).
We also included a robust back end library, where people could access lots of information and tools.
Final outcome
Our app came incredibly close to actually making it to production. Unfortunately, we learned a very hard lesson here... sometimes you have to respect hierarchy of product offerings and business tools. Sometimes companies can feel like a new or separate technology tool can take away from an existing product or elements already available to users. In hindsight they made the right decision, this was a great tool, but perhaps it should have been built through different partners... hint-hint friends with deep pockets, lets talk!
