Navigating Rocket Companies
A Rocket Companies Casestudy
THE CONTEXT Rocket family of companies has individual websites for Rocket Loan, Rocket Mortgage and Rocket Homes. The Ask Users did not know the offerings of the Rocket Brands. How might we decrease user confusion from navigating between sites and unite the family of companies to work as a cohesive experience? My Role As a Senior UX Designer I created and lead the research plan with help of a dedicated User Researcher to distill the insights. Crafted my vision of design patterns and collaborated with the Design System UI Designers in order to surface the best ideas. I was responsible to get buy in from each stakeholder on the for the overall direction of the solution and oversee it's implementation and success metrics. The Approach I lead the small team to focus on research questions that will solve the problem. Does a common navigation element shared by Rocket Loans, Rocket Mortgage, and Rocket Homes help clients: 1. Increase their understanding of RKT as a platform for their financial needs, and 2. Choose RKT for their lending needs/increase revenue?
Client
Rocket Mortgage
Role
User Research Design Systems UI & UX Design
Industries
Mortgage
Date
August 2022
The Why Our team embarked on a journey to uncover the value that a connection between our brands could bring to both users and the overall brand experience. If this connection proves valuable, we aim to determine the optimal approach for a navigation solution in terms of placement, hierarchy, and design. To begin we broke the research into 4 parts: Reasearch Plan Awareness Perception How current and prospective clients perceive our brands. Brand Strategy How we want to talk about Rocket brands. Current Day Behavior How users are moving between our products today Value Where we can get the most value out of building connections between Rocket brands. Key Findings Percentage of respondents in our survey study who had awareness of the following brands: Based on what we learned from our exploratory research, our common navigational element needs to: Illustrate the connection between the brands. Clients don’t understand Rocket as a platform because we haven’t told them about it. We need to visualize the shift from sister companies to Rocket companies. Explain what the different brands do. When we just rely on the brand name to do that work, we leave it open for confusion around where you go to do what.
THE SOLUTION The solution incorporated a reponsive approach and the best performing insights, on smaller screens scales to be a modern expandable chevron solution pictured above. After testing on 12 participant, 8 current Rocket company users and 4 potential users. The design with the collapsible menu was simple, performed better on mobile screens and had a higher task success rate. One design decision that drove success was my insight to label the menu items based on the product offering and not the sister company itself. “When I look to navigate to buying a home. I’d click on the top menu and would expect to learn more on the homepage. Adding too many words in the menu is distracting.” THE IMPACT The results allowed for increased brand consistency and improved analytics. Brand Experience Implemented across 5 family of companies websites, the navigation becomes a trusted part of the experience. Analytics The first goal of a 5-7% increase of traffic inflows between sites was completed within 45 day of launching the improved navigation component.