They do just what they say on the tin – whatever your financial aims are, whether it’s managing milestones in life such as getting married, or being able to go on more holidays, or build up some savings, there’s a guide to help you achieve it.

How-to Guide homepage

I think they look pretty enticing with the carousel for navigation. Each guide has the tasks broken down within it, so there’s loads of information here.  I even learnt a thing or two from our testing!

We’re going to add the ability for users to comment very shortly – some of the most useful tips have been from the lovemoney.com users.

How-to Guide task

We’ve been working on some other things too, which I’ll post about very shortly.

Designed by Julia, built by Phil and coded by Joseph – excellent work guys!

Begin by searching

The idea is that a user can filter down their mortgage options using our mortgage search and then select a mortgage they would like.

One good thing is that we check to see if they are eligible as part of the process, so the user won’t see products that they might not be able to get (as you usually do on best buy tables).

Apply online

Once they know which product they want, they can go on to fill in an application form for that product. I outlined it on our company blog here.

The main aim with the form was to  try and make it simple to fill out because most people associate a mortgage application with lots of boring paperwork, and it’s true, there is a lot of information that’s needed. I counted over 500 fields!

So our aim was to make the form as short as possible whilst still recording enough detail.

Initially we looked at all of the information that was required in an application and removed any fields that we felt could be collected at a later stage. The credit card details information fell into this category, as these can be obtained by the mortgage advisor.

We reused as much information as we could from the registration and previous journey that the customer has taken.

So,the form is prepopulated where possible: the image below is for a non-registered user, and the the one below that is for a registered user.

We divided the form into sections and, you only see the ones that you need. For example, if you’ve worked at the same job for more than three years, we will not need to know about your previous employment.

As the form is pretty long, also use the functional navigation to indicate how far along in the process you are and avoid disorientation!

There’s also a bit of encouragement here and there on the form!

The side bar indicates what information the user will need to have to hand, to save them time.

Above this, is the “We’re here to help’ the button that the user can click on to get help at any point throughout the form. This goes through to our mortgage team who can give help on the form itself or can advise on a mortgage, whatever the user needs.

Once the user submits their application, they get an email with details of their application. The mortgage team at lovemoney.com also get an email alerting them to the new application and they can view it so avoid asking rafts of questions and can get on with helping with the application.

So hopefully the process of applying for a mortgage is a bit less tedious than normal.

Ta da! lovemoney.com, our sparkling new site went live recently.

And it’s not just a pretty site.

It’s designed to help users grow richer and offers useful tools  which aim to motivate and support users to get their finances in order.  With personalised content and tools like Q&A, the idea is that users will be able to get access to  relevant content that will help them get to where they want to be financially.

As it will be a site that people use as a tool, the challenge is to make sure that it’s easy to use, with logical user journeys and clear messaging.

This is still very much a work in progress with new bits being added regularly and I think that will keep it looking and feeling fresh as the grass in the background.

Carl has been tweeting about the site and we’ve had some positive feedback from users. What do you think?