Mortgage onboarding redesign that helped lift new accounts 30%
New mortgage customers were dropping out of Chase MyHome onboarding and application flows.
I led the onboarding redesign on the Manhattan Design System and contributed to the application flows.
Accounts created rose 30% in 2024, and drop-off fell from 18% to 6–10%.
New mortgage customers were dropping out of onboarding and applications.
Drop-off in the mortgage application flows was 18%. Customers who got through faced balance, value, equity, rate, taxes, insurance, and payments, with few ways to make sense of them.
Three constraints shaped every screen: first, regulated disclosures; second, WCAG accessibility; and third, the shared Manhattan Design System.
Onboarding decides whether a new mortgage customer uses MyHome at all.
Showing everything at once overwhelms people, and showing too little hides what they care about. Every screen also had to pass legal and ADA review.
I chose shared components and early accessibility specs, even though both were slower.
Rebuild onboarding on shared components
I moved onboarding to the Manhattan Design System and added mobile-first components where it had gaps, so the redesign stayed consistent with the rest of Chase.
Instead of A faster redesign with one-off screens.
Trade-off A longer first release while components went through design system review.
Lead the home view with equity
In research, people described their home by what they owned in it more than by what they owed. The home view leads with value and equity, and shows how each payment adds to it.
Instead of Lead with the loan balance and next payment, like a typical servicing app.
Trade-off Payment details sit one level deeper for people who only come to pay.
In testing, a user said the equity view was “the first time I actually understood where my money was going.” Write accessibility specs before build
I wrote WCAG documentation with each flow, so engineering and ADA partners reviewed behavior before it was built.
Instead of Accessibility review at the end of each release.
Trade-off More documentation up front for every screen.
People can run the mortgage math on chase.com before applying. The calculators use the same components as the app.
The chase.com landing page leads into the same flows as the app.
More accounts, less drop-off, and a HELOC launch.
- +30%Accounts created2024, onboarding redesign · measured
- 18% → 6–10%Drop-off per stepapplication flows, contributed · measured
- 0 → 1Chase HELOC launchedMarch 2024, contributed · measured
The mobile-first components I contributed are now part of the Manhattan Design System, available to other Chase teams.
At Chase I started bringing legal and ADA in at the start of each flow.
Legal, ADA, and strategy worked with me as design partners instead of reviewing at the end. I kept working that way on Casey, Chase’s first customer-facing AI agent.