Challenge

The U.S. mortgage industry runs on a paradox. Loan officers spend heavily on leads from Zillow, Redfin, and aggregator networks, most of which never convert, because clicking a listing is not the same as being ready to buy. Meanwhile, the buyers who are genuinely motivated routinely stall. Not for lack of inventory or financing, but because the home-purchase process is opaque, jargon-heavy, and rarely meets people where they actually stand financially.

Research

Ten interviews with prospective first-time buyers, paired with a wall-sized process map I built alongside a working loan officer, surfaced the same pattern again and again. Educational resources exist in abundance, but they're generic, exhaustive, and built for nobody in particular. Buyers don't drop out because the content is wrong. They drop out because it isn't relevant to their debt, their credit, or the decision sitting in front of them this week.

The takeaway: personalization, not volume, drives completion.

Design

Omi is a consumer fintech app that uses debt-to-income ratio and a weighted credit score to generate a custom education path for each buyer. Progressive onboarding captures the Fannie Mae application data the lender ultimately needs, while the curriculum surfaces only the modules that close real knowledge gaps. Once qualified, the buyer is handed off to a vetted local loan officer as a warmed, high-intent lead.

That structure resolves the paradox from both ends. It converts a stalled buyer into a qualified applicant, and it hands the loan officer a lead that's already ready instead of another click that isn't.

That structure resolves the paradox from both ends. It converts a stalled buyer into a qualified applicant, and it hands the loan officer a lead that's already ready instead of another click that isn't.

The content lives at a high-school reading level, in plain language. I designed an isometric illustration system to build trust without the sterile fintech aesthetic.

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Dashboard

The dashboard served as the primary touchpoint that drove the rest of the experience. I created a few different compositions and did some user testing to test which version is easiest to understand.

With the direction from the user feedback on the dashboard, I settled on this direction and built out the rest of the dashboard.

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Results

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Omi shipped on both app stores and proved its core thesis: that relevant, just in time education could turn first time buyers into qualified mortgage leads. Instead of an exhaustive course nobody finished, the product surfaced only the next step each buyer needed, then handed warm leads to loan officers.

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25

qualified leads created and routed to loan officers

800

app downloads per month

‍2

mortgage companies onboarded as launch partners

‍iOS and Android

‍live in both app stores