The Community Preservation Corporation (CPC) needed a tool for its website to interest potential borrowers in green loans by helping them understand the benefits and requirements of green loans.

Overview

The Community Preservation Corporation (CPC), a nonprofit affordable-housing finance company, wanted to educate borrowers about green loans and encourage them to take out green loans instead of conventional ones. Green loans target property owners and developers who are doing new construction or renovation projects.

The loans encourage energy-efficient projects that lower building operating costs and allow the borrower to get a larger loan, often with additional benefits. Bright Power was contracted to create a tool that would help building owners and developers understand the potential value of green loans.

Team

Our teams collaborated throughout the process and the intern at CPC was especially helpful in coordinating and acting as project manger when the actual project manger went on paternity leave.

Role

I provided user experience and visual design, and collaborated with CPC’s marketing team on content strategy. I also helped with some front-end development so the developers could focus on implementing the correct calculations.

Timeline

~ 4 months

Basis of design

As always, my first step was to learn as much as I could about both the environment in which the app would be used and its users. That meant learning about green energy, green loans, the role of brokers, the kind of changes that qualified a property for green loans, the way incentives worked, and so on. I immersed myself in the subject.

Before we started work on the project, we met with the CPC team so we could clarify their goals and learn about the users — both loan officers and borrowers — the challenges of selling green loans, and validate our understanding of the real estate lending process.

For this project, I didn’t have access to borrowers, so loan officers, who regularly interacted with potential borrowers, acted as stand-ins. I also talked with my father, a realtor who sells investment properties, for his insight into the needs of both owners and developers. Getting multiple points of view — rather than relying on a single source — is crucial to understanding user needs and prevents bias in my decisions.

goals

CPC had multiple goals for this app, each of which had to be considered in the design.

• CPC needed to reach a very particular audience, educate them about green loans, and motivate them to contact CPC. Key to this goal was overcoming the myth that “green” loses money. We needed to quickly show the value of investing in energy efficiency — how much more money they can borrow — and overcome the myth that green is bad for the bottom line.

• CPC also wanted to become the energy advisor to developers and builders who used the app.

• In addition, the data gathered by the app would help both CPC and Bright Power uncover new clients and markets.

solution

The team decided on a web app that estimates annual savings after implementing energy and water upgrades, as well as the additional loan proceeds available to a borrower. A borrower also can see and compare scopes of work for simple, moderate, and substantial upgrades.

Audience

Borrowers can be divided into three groups, those who:

• Have benefited from energy efficient projects in the past, or are very knowledgeable about these projects, and eager to do them.

• Hear the word “green” and immediately think of high costs and losing money, the hard sells.

• Are unsure about whether green energy is worth the investment but are open to the idea.

The unsure-but-willing-to-listen were the primary focus. In addition, loan officers also expected to use the calculator to initiate conversations with potential borrowers in a variety of settings — on the phone, at events, in meetings, etc. The app had to engage both those wanting only an overview of green loans — builders and owners new to the idea — and those who wanted to take a deeper dive into the benefits for a particular building — brokers. To make an app that was useful in diverse situations, I needed to understand both the concerns of borrowers and the questions brokers ask before discussing green loans.

Initial steps

With the goals and users in mind, I began sketching. I knew the app would consist largely of a form — a borrower needed to enter property information in order to get results.

I kept several questions in mind as I sketched:

• How to make a long form usable and less intimidating so users would want to continue?

• How to display results to encourage borrowers to fill out additional fields?

• How to design the saving and scope of work sections to focus attention on savings rather than required work?

• How to clearly display a lot of information and focus attention across devices?

Sketching also helped clarify the necessary screens and flow users could follow. I wanted to ensure that:

• Borrowers with projects outside the covered areas did not need to input additional fields.

• Users understood the purpose of the app regardless of how they found it.

• Both loan officers and borrowers could successfully complete and navigate the app.

• Users would be directed to the appropriate scope of work based on anticipated project.

GUIDING PRINCIPLES

Green loans are a complex process, with many layers. I didn’t want to overwhelm clients who were just exploring this area, but I did want to give them a way to increase their understanding of the possibilities so I developed guiding principles for the app.

• Keep it simple.

• Don’t overwhelm.

• Communicate value.

• Make a connection.

Keep it simple

I needed to simplify a complicated subject, present it in a friendly, digestible way, and keep the focus on savings and increased loan proceeds rather than on the feel-good benefits of energy efficiency.

My initial prototype looked like a typical form, using standard form inputs. As the questions progressed, the form felt long and unwieldy. This was unacceptable so I reduced the form to three questions. Enter your zip code in the prototype on the left and let me know what you think.

I decided to switch to a natural language form to make the calculator feel like a conversation and lessen the intimidation factor. This also validated my decision to design the mobile version first.

I also worked with CPC to ensure we used language that reflected user values. The results made it clear that a borrower can reap the benefits of being “green” without a heavy investment of time or money.

Don’t overwhelm

Energy engineers wanted as many data points as possible to calculate the results most accurately. But having too many questions would make the calculator time-consuming, intimidating, and overwhelming to users. We needed to balance accurate results with user engagement, and avoid asking questions users don’t know the answers to, asking intrusive questions, and making the form feel like a chore. All of these increase the risk that users will quit part way through and leave them with a negative feeling about CPC and green loans.

To keep the calculator intriguing, CPC and I decided to divide the calculator into two parts. The first set of questions is narrow in scope, the least amount of information you can ask and still give valuable feedback. After much brainstorming, the simple calculator asks only three questions:

• Where is the project located? (We don’t have data for all areas, and don’t want frustrated users discovering this after they’ve completed a form.)

• How old is the building?

• How many units does it have?

Where possible, the answer options have really broad ranges in order to reduce the chance that people will get stuck and give up.

The results of the first calculation whets a borrower’s appetite for savings and motivates them to get more detailed information by answering additional questions. It’s all about removing friction and enticing people to seek more.

For the more detailed, second calculator, we decided to make all the questions optional. A user could skip questions they can’t answer, such as who pays for the electricity in the building. The answer would be useful but we did not want borrowers to leave the app to try to find the information — they may not come back.

I worked with Bright Power’s engineers to build in logic that further reduced the number of questions asked and prevented users from making mistakes, again ensuring a good experience.

Refining the design and exploring natural language forms

Communicate value

The target users are specifically interested in increased property values and ROI. Sustainability and “greenness” are not necessarily a borrower’s highest priorities, even if the borrower might feel good about them. To reinforce the value of green loans, I changed the labeling on the buttons — See My Savings instead of Submit.

I worked with both CPC and our energy engineers to reduce the amount of information in the results so users could focus on potential savings and the potential increase in loan proceeds.

Focusing attention on savings

Using the CTA to keep attention on savings

Make a connection

After the simple calculation, users are encouraged to refine their results, which leads them to the next, more comprehensive set of questions or to contact the loan officer for their area.

After spending time answering questions in the more detailed calculations, a user should be more invested in getting results and taking action on those results. The primary outcome at this point is that a user, who may have initially been skeptical about green loans, is now interested enough to contact a loan officer to further the conversation. If a user is not quite ready for that, or simply is not interested in making a call, they can email themselves their results, giving CPC an instant lead.

Metrics and results

Unfortunately, we were unable to see any metrics after handing the project off to CPC. The client was so happy with the product, however, that they want to work on an expanded version of the tool that will cover more use cases and reach more clients. Overall, the client loved the product and were very happy with it.

“It looks great!”

REFLECTIONS

The complexity of algorithms required a lot of development time to implement so less time was available for front-end work. Although I did some of the front-end development to keep the project on schedule, I should have started coding sooner.

We turned the completed app over to the client’s team to upload to their site. In that process, changes were made that degraded the app. In the future, I will ask to review the app before it goes live to ensure the integrity of the design and language.

Try it!

You can try CPC VeriFi or read more about the project and calculations.