Objectives

How might we improve services around the Help to Buy scheme?

In the Discovery phase, our goal was to learn how to better serve a wide range of users with different needs using the Help to Buy Equity Loan scheme.

We considered how we handle the bigger challenges with the combined systems, policies and processes between external service providers and internal service operators.

In addition to that, we wanted to understand what changes would positively impact the experience for all, compared to the existing user journeys. This helped us to prioritise what to validate in the next phase of service development.

Empathise

It was easy to get in but hard to get out.

The service landscape shows all actors, their action flows and data flows within and around the service, which helped the team understand the ecosystem and lifespan of the service holistically. 

We carried out in-depth interviews with homeowners who used the Help to Buy scheme when they purchased their first home and discovered that the critical pain point for loan borrowers is that it's hard to figure out how to pay back after 5 years of no-interest period. 

Based on our findings from customer interviews and stakeholder workshops we created a couple of customer personas and mapped out their journey when paying back the loan, which is identified as the most complicated process for loan borrowers.

Define

The service as-is:
from applying for the loan through home purchasing to paying back the loan.

We documented the end-to-end customer journey in a series of service blueprints to visualise the components of a service in enough detail to objectively analyse how the people, processes and technology interact.

The end-to-end service blueprints describe the existing service as well as provide the basis to help define and implement improvements.

Explore

The service to-be:
self-served application and management service on Help to Buy Equity Loan.

Our hypothesis is that user experience would be better when all activities are carried out on a single joined-up digital platform.

The blueprint highlights areas that we could consider improving: interactions between customers and front-stage services, supporting processes, guidance and tools.

Create

How might we enable customers to apply for and manage loans in a single digital service?

We ran a few workshops with stakeholders and came up with some ideas to shape a series of user flows for applying and paying back. We then worked on the service blueprint again to visualise the details of the interaction between and across all users and systems. Those interactions were prototyped in code and tested with 25 end users to validate and iterate.

The first huddle was to join up other government services such as Gov Gateway, Gov Payment and Gov Notify with ours and replace the wet signature with digital. We've reached out to the wider UX community in Gov and learned from their experiences.

Another challenge in content creation was making it simple for users to understand the repayment process and how they can proceed in the face of an uncertain future and changes in their circumstances. We took a step-by-step guidance approach, as well as government-wide help and support, to ensure that users are aware and can make informed decisions.

Service blueprint to-be

Prototype for repayment application

Validate

How might we help users feel confident about what they need to do next?

The repayment process is lengthy, involving legar and financial experts. Our focus was on loan borrowers, as well as solicitors and internal data users, to ensure that they were all informed of the late figures and the next steps to take.

Rather than explaining everything upfront, we took the approach of informing users with the right amount of information at the right time when they needed it. This hypothesis performed well in testing, and we learned that we needed to contextualise the information according to the user's thought process.

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