Owning a Home Landing Page Design

Owning a Home is a suite of educational web tools and resources aimed at helping first-time homebuyers navigate the mortgage process and encourage consumers to shop for a mortgage to get the best deal for them. Developing Owning a Home was a long-term project, which lasted several years. I was involved in this project from concept through initial release, and then iterative improvements based on testing and analytics.

For the majority of the project’s duration, I led the project as scrum master and lead designer, working on the product vision with the product owner and subject matter experts, on the design execution, and supporting the team in self-organizing to develop and release the work.

Visit the Owning a Home suite of resources.


Explore interest rates

Owning a Home Explore interest rates tool

Given the size and length of the project, I had the opportunity to work on a wide variety of work: designing complex interactive tools, developing a series of images that illustrate steps in the home buying process, participating in usability testing and adapting our designs to user and stakeholder feedback, using analytics to influence design iterations, and developing project roadmaps and participating in scoping.

The core of the Owning a Home experience is the Explore Rates tool, which allows consumers to look up benchmarks about what interests rates are available to people like them. This tool was particularly challenging to design—it was important to make the experience feel approachable and easy to digest, encourage users to experiment so they learn how different factors affect interest rate, while making a complex set of variables feel simple. Designing the tool required working side-by-side with our mortgage and data subject matter experts to gain a broad understanding of mortgage options and ensure accuracy of representation of the data.


Know the Process

Owning a Home Know the Process Design

The Know the Process guide is a set of pages that provide an overview of the mortgage process, which are designed to allow users to both get a high-level sense of the process and dig deeply into action-oriented steps.

Know the Process was designed to offer a linear way to access the Owning a Home information and resources, as a contrast to the Landing page, which allows users to dip into resources ad hoc, with less context.


Know the process illustrations

Owning a Home Illustrations Set

As a part of designing the Know the process guide, I designed a set of illustrations that work within CFPB’s brand language to communicate and visualize the steps in getting a mortgage.




This project was completed as a part of a team of in-house CFPB designers and developers that I led.