Rocket family of companies has individual websites for Rocket Loan, Rocket Mortgage and Rocket Homes. 

The Ask

Users did not know the offerings of the Rocket Brands. How might we decrease user confusion from navigating between sites and unite the family of companies to work as a cohesive experience?

The Approach

I lead the small team to focus on research questions that will solve the problem. Does a common navigation element shared by Rocket Loans, Rocket Mortgage, and Rocket Homes help clients:

1. Increase their understanding of RKT as a platform for their financial needs, and

2. Choose RKT for their lending needs/increase revenue?  

The Why

Our team embarked on a journey to uncover the value that a connection between our brands could bring to both users and the overall brand experience. If this connection proves valuable, we aim to determine the optimal approach for a navigation solution in terms of placement, hierarchy, and design. To begin we broke the research into 4 parts:

Reasearch Plan Tenets

Based on what we learned from our exploratory research, our common navigational element needs to:

• Illustrate the connection between the brands.

Clients don’t understand Rocket as a platform because we haven’t told them about it. We need to visualize the shift from sister companies to Rocket companies.

• Explain what the different brands do.

When we just rely on the brand name to do that work, we leave it open for confusion around where you go to do what.

We moved into usability testing and prototyping for the next phase to test our solutions. Here are some designs we tested: 

After testing on 12 participant, 8 current Rocket company users and 4 potential users. The design with the collapsible menu was simple, performed better on mobile screens and had a higher task success rate.
One design decision that drove success was my insight to label the menu items based on the product offering and not the sister company itself.

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“When I look to navigate to buying a home. I’d click on the top menu and would expect to learn more on the homepage. Adding too many words in the menu is distracting.”