Home Equity Investments (HEI) - Onboarding Flow
A FinTech onboarding process redesign that cut processing time and doubled the qualified lead rate
TL:DR
HEI lets homeowners unlock cash from their home's future appreciation — without a traditional loan. The onboarding process was taking up to 15 days and burning executive time on leads that would never qualify. As the solo UX Designer, I redesigned the end-to-end flow for two user types simultaneously — cutting onboarding to 5 days, pushing qualified lead rate from 40% to 80%, and achieving 9.8/10 customer satisfaction.
Project Background
HEI lets homeowners unlock cash from their home's future appreciation without taking a traditional loan. But the onboarding process was slow, opaque, and burning executive time on unqualified applicants. I redesigned the entire flow — from first touchpoint to funded — for two very different users simultaneously.
User Interviews
Initially, we spoke with some of our customers and executives—the customer-facing employees—and conducted mock sessions to walk through the entire onboarding process to understand the current journey, and to uncover pain points.
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Customers
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Initial steps did not follow familiar lending workflows.
HEI process unclear, yet requires detailed inputs.
Onboarding is lengthy and lacks transparency.
Monthly updates shared as complex Excel files.
Notices and buyouts communicated solely via email.
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Executives
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Efforts wasted on ineligible users & unproductive meetings.
Complex, error-prone documentation and calls.
Inefficient agency coordination via email.
Manual preparation of monthly updates.
Management of large, complex Excel datasets.
Other Key Insights from Mock Sessions
Redirection to external pages for details appears suspicious.
Lack of any official confirmation post–form submission led to higher user drop-off rates.
No official contact source available before the intro call.
Product cannot be explored independently, even for cash-out estimation.
Inefficient onboarding procedure taking up to 15 days to complete
User Personas
User Journeys
Subsequently, I mapped user journeys for both groups to uncover real-time bottlenecks, pain points & dependencies.
Customer Journey
Executive Journey
Competitive Analysis
To understand how other players in the market were addressing similar customer needs and experiences, I conducted a competitive analysis.
Experience principle
HEI mechanics explained
Address-first entry
Data prepopulation
Property context
Immediate estimate
Scenario exploration
Value before PII
PII after user intent
Fixing the Flow
From our research, we identified key bottlenecks and friction points, leading us to simplify the existing flow using. The redesigned flow consists of four main steps (outlined below) that make the process simpler and more intuitive.
Step 1
Step 2
Step 3
Step 4
New User flow (hover to zoom)
Conceptualization & Sketching
After finding out the basic requirements of the user, the key steps were identified and ideated. Sketching helped us as we followed an agile method to quickly get an idea of how the product is going to shape and give a rough idea of the concepts.
Initial Iterations
Digital Lo-Fi
Final Screens (Main features)
Property Search
Easy search by property address or location.
Owners can instantly view real-time property values without depending on an executive.
Owner & Property Details
Customers can now verify their basic details, property information, and property values
A real-time street view feature allows them to visually identify and confirm their property, providing added confidence.
Cash Out Calculator
Customers can now estimate their cash-out value based on their property value and mortgage.
This enhances transparency by giving them control to choose their preferred cash-out amount.
Customer Dashboard
The main feature provides an overview of key details such as current home value, current investment value, settlement date, and time to settle.
Users can now view updated values on a monthly basis directly in the dashboard, eliminating the need to skim through complex Excel sheets in the conventional flow.
Important information such as home insights, investment agreements, settlement calculators, appraisal reports, credit reports, and notices is easily accessible within the dashboard, reducing reliance on email communication.
Usability Testing Insights
Conducting usability testing with the internal team, customers, and executives yielded the following observations:
Issue: 20% of users struggled to understand progress and application status in the dashboard.
Fix: Introduced step-level progress bars and a global progress tracker for sections within the application dashboard.Issue: ~35% of property details could not be fetched by the Propradar API in V1.
Fix: Added an alternate flow allowing users to manually enter home and mortgage values to access cash-out and payback calculators.
Key Metrics Impacted
Customer Onboarding time in days
Customer Satisfaction
Qualified Lead Rate
Key Takeaways
Educating users early saves effort
Moving FICO pre-qualification to Step 1 eliminated ~60% of unqualified applications before any executive time was spent. The best UX decision we made wasn't a design — it was deciding what to show first.In FinTech, transparency isn't a feature — it's the product.
Every drop-off in the old flow was a trust failure. Users who didn't understand what was happening simply left. The cash-out calculator and real-time property verification weren't nice-to-haves — they were the moments that made users feel safe enough to continue..Designing for two users simultaneously is an IA problem first.
The temptation was to design the customer flow and add executive features after. Getting the information architecture right for both users from the start meant neither experience felt like an afterthought.Edge cases aren't edge cases in financial flows.
The Propradar API failing on 35% of properties wasn't an edge case — it was a mainstream failure mode that usability testing caught before launch. Designing the manual fallback wasn't extra work. It was the difference between a usable and an unusable product.The best insight came from the people closest to the problem.
Mock sessions with executives surfaced the lead quality problem that pure user interviews missed. Getting the right people in the room — not just end users — changed the direction of the entire project.