Aligning Conversion Goals with User Intent at Rocket Homes
Client: Rocket Homes | Product Marketing Department
Role: UX Lead & CRO Strategist
Collaborators: SEO, Content
The Problem
Rocket Homes wanted to improve conversions on their property listing pages, but were asking too much of users at this stage of the home-buying journey. With no access to analytics or heatmap data, and a compressed timeline to demonstrate our team’s capabilities, we needed to move fast — and be right.
Reframing The Problem
Early in the engagement, the client pushed to optimize listing pages for mortgage applications — a higher-value lead on paper. But mortgage applications are a bottom-of-funnel action being asked of a top-of-funnel user. Someone browsing a property listing is in discovery mode, not decision mode. Asking them to apply for a mortgage at that moment creates friction that kills the conversion entirely.
We reframed the north star metric to tour scheduling — a lower-friction action that aligns with user intent at that stage, moves prospects into an agent relationship, and opens the door to financing conversations naturally. The funnel needed to work with user readiness, not against it.
What I Did
Competitive Analysis: Benchmarked Rocket Homes’ property listing pages against key competitors, focusing on the features most directly tied to tour scheduling and lead quality — not just visual design patterns.
Agent Interviews: Rather than only testing the buyer experience, I went a layer deeper. I submitted real tour requests on Rocket Homes and competitor sites, then spoke directly with the agents receiving those leads. I disclosed my role and asked them about lead quality, missing information, and what made a prospect worth pursuing.
What I heard consistently: competitor leads were arriving unqualified and unprepared. Buyers didn’t understand the pre-approval requirement, which created friction for agents and stalled deals. Rocket Homes’ integration of pre-approval into the early conversation emerged as a genuine competitive differentiator — one that wasn’t being communicated clearly enough on the listing pages themselves.
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Key Insight
The listing page wasn’t just a discovery surface — it was the moment to set buyer expectations and establish Rocket Homes’ process advantage. Competitors were losing deals at the agent handoff because the website hadn’t done the educational work upfront. Surfacing the pre-approval advantage earlier in the listing experience could improve both conversion rate and lead quality simultaneously.
Output
Delivered a prioritized set of UX and SEO recommendations focused on three conversion levers:
- Reducing friction in the tour scheduling flow
- Surfacing the pre-approval differentiator earlier in the listing experience
- Aligning page content with the three core user goals identified in prior client research: listing a property, scheduling a tour, and getting pre-approved
Recommendations were scoped to what the product team could realistically implement given resource constraints, with a measurement plan outlining the metrics to track post-launch.
What I’d Measure
Tour scheduling conversion rate, lead quality score from agent feedback, and drop-off rate at the tour request form. Secondary: whether surfacing pre-approval messaging earlier in the listing page increases mortgage application starts downstream.
What I Learned
Going directly to agents — the people receiving the leads — unlocked insights that no analytics tool would have surfaced. On future projects without data access, qualitative interviews with downstream stakeholders (not just end users) is now a default research method. I’d also use AI-assisted review mining earlier in the process to identify patterns in customer sentiment before conducting live interviews.