01: Nationwide Building Society

Mortgage Decision in Principle Web App

About Nationwide

The world's largest building society, run for the benefit of its members. Helping you with your current account, mortgage, savings and other personal finance needs.

Decision in principle web app homeage

Project goal

Design a new Mortgage Decision in Principle online application form which is easier to use, accessible (AA), inclusive and meets our user needs and they’re edge cases. It needs to give them reassurance and confidence to stay online which will help reduce cost of application to the business.

Design restraints

The mortgage process is complex, jargon-filled and daunting for customers. There was legacy tech and services to navigate which heavily influence our design decisions.

My role

Lead UI Designer working remotely

Design principles developed from user research

  • Reduce friction
  • Support
  • Resassurance
  • Transparency
  • Maintain momentum
  • Accessibility

How we approached the redesign

Discovery: user interviews of first time buyer and remortgage customers, stakeholder interviews, tech exploration, design ideation, user personas, journey flows. Usabaility testing of three different prototypes replicating a full mortage application.

Incubation: presenting research findings, design direction, project team and stakeholder insight, feedback, feature prioritisation and MPV scoping .

Product Development: worked in an agile manner discovering requirements and developing solutions through team collaboration.

Product delivery: Nationwide is launching the application. Feedback will be taken from end users to form and evolve the designs.

Decision in principle property price graphic

Design Direction

Our main approach to the design was to chunk the content. This refers to the process of taking individual pieces of information and grouping them into larger units. This makes shorter forms per page but the trade off is more page clicks. The decision after all our usability testing identified users preferred simple and shorter forms as their confidence grew using the applicationas. Shorter pages also means lower congitive load for our end users, enabling the application process to feel less daunting.

Nationwide Building Society Design System was used as it is our single source of truth for all the UI elements allow us to improve consistency across Nationwide's platforms, also save time and money.

Decision in principle intro page to income
Decision in principle ananual income

The image above is a good an example of how we chunked the journeys content.

Decision in principle Loan requirements page

Pages of the journey were designed with the intent to resolve the challenge of customers inputting the wrong data on mortgage application, which is an issue with the old designs. The items on the page are optional and users can click to include an outgoing. They user progresses to an additional page with related questions, which they are then prompted to fill out. The user is then present with a summary of their data. This page is a good example of the types of illustrations added throughout the application to aid visual users and make the process feel friendlier.

Decision in principle personal loan user interface

This page is an example of the related questions which appear when a user includes an outgoing.

Decision in principle results page