Fintech UX & Product Redesign

LoanInsights: turning a calculator into an acquisition engine

Redesign of LoanInsights’ mortgage calculator and property-comparison tool into a mobile-first, geolocation-driven customer-acquisition engine.

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Client: LoanInsights
Industry: Finance & Investment
Discipline: Fintech UX & Product Redesign

The challenge

LoanInsights had a working mortgage calculator, but most visitors never reached it. Drop-off was high before people even got there, mobile usability was weak despite mobile being the primary way in, and a live property-data API sat mostly unused behind a plain address lookup. The deeper problem wasn’t the calculator itself: a financially mixed, mostly-mobile audience was giving up early, and the long forms in front of them made every step feel like a commitment before they’d seen any reason to make one.

A woman checking a property report on her phone on a suburban footpath: 42 Robert St, Leichhardt, with a 3D building footprint, estimated value of $1,250,000 and a Start Loan Wizard button — Built for the moment it's actually used: checking a property on the street, phone in hand

Key responsibilities

Led the UX vision and roadmap for the redesign, from problem framing and journey mapping through to delivery
Facilitated stakeholder workshops and set priorities across the wider team
Worked closely with developers to bring live property data into the experience at scale
Partnered with marketing so design decisions translated directly into measurable business outcomes

Team & collaboration

The redesign ran across three working relationships, not a single design handoff at the end:

Role	Contribution	Relationship
Developers	Integrated the live property-data API into the map and search, at scale	Close, ongoing collaboration through build and launch
Marketing	Shaped the behaviour-triggered follow-ups — reminders, saved-suburb alerts, price-change updates	Partnered from mid-project through post-launch
Stakeholders	Set direction and priorities through regular workshops	Workshops held throughout the engagement

My thinking — key insight

Delay the ask. Users resisted logging in before they’d seen any value, so login moved from the front door to after the calculator itself — people could explore an outcome before committing to anything. Long, form-heavy inputs became a guided wizard: sliders and toggles built for mobile micro-interactions instead of a wall of fields. The same requirement, asked at a different moment, turned from a hurdle into a reward.

My thinking — secondary insight

Engagement doesn’t end at conversion. Once someone had used the calculator, their own behaviour became the input for what came next: a reminder for an incomplete calculation, an alert when a saved suburb’s prices moved, a nudge tied to a favourited property. That turned a single-use calculator into something people had a reason to open again.

The approach

Replaced long, form-heavy flows with a guided, step-based wizard built for mobile
Surfaced live property data directly in the experience, turning a single-address lookup into an explorable map
Rebuilt the experience mobile-first rather than adapting desktop patterns
Added contextual next steps — a broker call or an emailed report — right at the point of decision, opening a revenue stream that wasn’t part of the original brief

Key thinking

The real design question was one of sequencing: get people meaningfully into the calculator before asking anything of them, then use what that process reveals — an abandoned calculation, a favourited suburb, a price change — to bring them back with something specific rather than a generic nudge. That sequencing, more than any single screen, is what took LoanInsights from a tool people used once to one they kept coming back to.

Try it yourself

Explore the LoanInsights prototype

Step through the guided, mobile-first wizard yourself — from a sliding borrowing amount through to an estimated loan and price-evolution chart.

Explore the prototype

Gallery

A full property report, estimated value, land size and features, surfaced before any login
Live and historical price data made explorable, not just searchable one address at a time
The guided wizard: sliders and icon choices instead of a wall of form fields