Nicole Kina's Portfolio

Rocket Mortgage: Blog

Role: UX Designer
Deliverables: High-Fidelity mockups, Prototype
The Team: 1 Product Managers, 1 Product Owner, 6 Engineers
My Responsibilities: I was responsible for enhancing the Quicken Loans blog while meeting the stakeholder’s wants and decreasing bounce rate

Problem

Zing is a blog by Quicken Loans that publishes articles related to home, finances, and life. Zing blog generated the highest amount of organic traffic from Google out of all Quicken Loans’ sites. The problem was that there was also a high bounce rate. Users would read an article and leave. I was tasked with redesigning the Zing blog with elements to engage users more.

Actions

Requirements Gathering & Ideation Session – First I held a session with the stakeholders and authors of the blog, as well as the product owners and managers. We discussed the business requirements, and reviewed negative feedback from users based on a Qualtrics survey launch . Next, we rapidly ideated on what the new design would have. We dot voted on our favorite ideas.

Sketches and Wireframes - I started with sketches based on the ideas generated from the ideation session. I shared the sketches with the authors of the site to ensure we were on the same page of what we learned in the ideation session. I refined those sketches with creating wireframes.

 High-Fidelity Mockups, Usability Testing & Revise – I created high-fidelity mockups using Adobe Illustrator. The images were then converted to prototypes in Invision. Both desktop, and mobile designs were then tested using usertesting.com. We revised the designs until satisfied with the user feedback.

Results

As a result, we received less customer complaints of the features that we didn’t have before the redesign. We also saw an increase of customers navigated from Zing blog to QuickenLoans.com. We were looking for more engagement and with Zing being the site with the most visits, the increase in navigation was a plus.

Learned

This was one of my first big products I designed. I learned the importance of ideation sessions from this project. Holding the ideation sessions with the team brought us closer and the members felt that they had a say in the final design. The authors knew the users more than I did because they were the ones replying to their comments. They were valuable in this project because they could empathize with them.