Mortgage Calculator Master Feature

As an intern for Freddie Mac during the summer of 2022, I was tasked to innovate a master feature for mortgage calculators. I cycled through the phases of the design thinking process, starting with market research. I researched and documented current mortgage calculators to assess the common functionalities and patterns in existing calculators. I also explored related applications relevant to buying a home such as Zillow and Realtor.com.

After a thorough assessment of the market, I began to create personas, define their goals, and discover opportunities for improvement and innovation to make mortgage calculators more useful to users. I continued to document all of these steps in the process in Mural (that I unfortunately don’t have access to anymore). In this phase, I periodically presented my work to my team to receive their feedback.

The final phase I was able to complete was a low-fidelity prototype. For my master feature, I added the ability to save mortgage scenarios and compare them to other scenarios and other locations. With this save and compare feature, users are able to personalize their experience and more easily find out what mortgage scenario is best fit for their needs and their finances. I created a sketch prototype and used Adobe XD to make it interactive. I completed two phases of feedback and iteration on my prototype in my time as an intern.