We’re pleased to announce the launch of the New Street Mortgages website, designed and built by Dock9.
New Street Mortgages is an innovative new mortgage lender that brings a new dynamic to the traditional mortgage lending process, offering modern mortgages for brokers and borrowers. The New Street lending process is centred on fast, online decision-making combined with a broker portal which offers real-time case tracking and access to underwriter notes to provide more sophisticated, analytics-driven lending. Using this data-focused approach to mortgage lending, it will be possible for some New Street customers to secure a mortgage in only 5 days.
Dock9 was approached to design and build the front-end website. The project brief focused on delivering a demonstrably easier experience for the main user group, mortgage intermediaries, than competitor websites. Our user experience design process included face-to-face at a lab with real users during development to validate the design approach on the site and incorporate user feedback before launch.
Accessible lending criteria
Quickly understanding the lending criteria is a primary task of mortgage brokers. Reviewing competitor websites and listening to user feedback showed, however, that it was often not easily found and hard to scan for a quick answer when it was.
Our goal was to design the simplest interface possible that made lending criteria accessible to brokers, while at the same time recognising that some users preferred to either browse lending criteria and others preferred to search.
Our solution was to develop an interactive lending criteria section that enables the user to easily toggle between “browse” and “search” modes.
The browse section is clearly segmented into different categories, with iconography and smart use of white space used to create an easily-scannable page. If a user scrolls below the fold the category tabs are pinned to the top of the screen to ensure they are always accessible.
The search functionality features “live” search; as the user types their query it instantly narrows down the list of results upon each letter being entered.
Both features, along with the rest of the website, are fully responsible to mobile and tablet devices.
Sitefinity CMS platform
Giving business users within New Street full control of the website content in an easy to use interface, drag and drop interface, was a key requirement in the brief.
We delivered this by building the site on the Sitefinity Content Management System. In addition to market-leading content management, personalisation and marketing features Sitefinity’s extensibility also enabled our .NET developers to extend the core functionality to meet New Street Mortgages’s specific project needs. In addition to widgets to enable New Street to easily manage lending criteria we also developed a custom module for easily managing mortgage rate imports.
Client feedback
Camilla Winlo, Head of Marketing at New Street Mortgages, gave us the following testimonial for our work on the project:
“Mark and his team have been fantastic throughout this project. They are fast, flexible and great at creative problem solving. We are really pleased with the end result and look forward to working with Dock9 as we build and develop the site.”
Find out more about our other financial services website design work or the Sitefinity platform.
