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Home-Buying Experience Vision (Newrez)
Unified a fragmented mortgage experience into a connected, prototype-ready service vision
What was happening

Customers moving through the mortgage process experienced long, opaque, and inconsistent application flows, resulting in drop-off and refinancing loss to competitors.

What was wrong

The organization attributed delays primarily to broker inefficiency and missed rate lock windows.

Key Findings
  1. 1.Customers were losing their guaranteed interest rates because of delays, miscommunication, and preventable errors on both sides of the experience.
  2. 2.Loan processing staff were completely abandoning the provided tools in favor of their own workarounds.
Insights
  • Loan completion behavior was consistent across specific behavioral patterns, not demographics.
  • Internal personas did not reflect real behavioral segmentation.
  • Tools intended to improve efficiency often introduced additional work.
  • Each role in the process optimized locally, creating downstream rework.
  • The system was fragmented across incompatible working styles.
Sector
Financial Services
Focus
Experience Visioning
Workflow Optimization
Timing
8 Months • 2021–22
Methods
  • Ethnographic Field Research
  • In-Depth Interviews
  • Direct & Indirect Observation
  • Behavioral Segmentation
  • Design Thinking
  • Jobs to Be Done
  • Journey Mapping
  • Co-Creation Workshops
  • Research Synthesis
  • Insights Development
  • Service Blueprinting
  • Executive-Ready Reporting
  • Digital Service Design
Newrez Experience Vision
Demo coming soon
Results

A unified experience vision was developed for both customers and internal teams, reframing the mortgage process as a connected service rather than a sequence of disconnected tasks.

The organization shifted toward testing smaller, prototype-driven improvements rather than attempting fully defined end-to-end solutions upfront.

© 2026 · Matthew Abate