We’ve been busy making a few tweaks here and there to our mortgage engine over the last few iterations so I thought it was about time for an update. Here’s how it looks:
The landing page
Karen has styled the engine so that it uses the ‘secure’ look and feel of the site, which was first of all used by our Online Banking tool. Ben designed a lovely clean new landing page with a nice big orange button that signposts where to click. Great job!
You can now login to save your searches. Handy if you want to try and then search again in a bit – without having to fill out loads of fields. Nice work Colin!
Initial questions
We’ve added instant chat too, so that people can quickly ask our advisors something – handy if they don’t think their question merits a phonecall and it’s discreet too.
Eligibility
This section asks eligibility questions to make sure that the results produced are mortgages that the user could actually get.
The results are therefore pretty different from a normal best buy table in this respect. Usually these tables feature links for the products with the best rates. Often these products have criteria that need to be met and you only learn whether or not you fit the criteria by applying for the product. So doing it this way saves the user lots of time and form filling.
Refine your results
More filters – here the user can specify which features they’re looking for, like offset mortgages for example , and allows them to select up to 4 mortgages to compare.
Select your product
Once the user has compared mortgages, it’s easy to select and find out how to apply.
What next…
So it’s nice and easy for our users to find a mortgage 
The other thing I really like is our case management tool. If someone takes out a mortgage with us, our advisors keep them up to date by posting updates and useful docs on the user’s personal mortgage homepage. I’ll do a post on this soon…
