RealFinity
2026
Untangling Mortgage Comparisons for Real Borrowers
Redesigning the pricing quotes experience for borrowers navigating one of the most important decisions of their lives.
Overview
About the Project
RealFinity is a Miami-based mortgage platform that connects borrowers with wholesale lenders to surface competitive loan rates. During my internship, I joined the design team to help redesign their core borrower-facing experience — the pricing quotes page, where borrowers compare loan scenarios and decide whether to move forward.
It's the most consequential screen in the product. And it needed work.
Problem
The scenarios blended together
The first thing I noticed when I looked at the existing design: if you were a borrower staring at three or four loan scenarios, there was no clear visual separation between them. The information was all there — rate, APR, term, monthly payment — but it lived in a flat, undifferentiated layout that made comparison feel like a memory game.
Mortgage decisions already require holding a lot in your head at once. The design was making that harder, not easier.
Research
I had to understand mortgages before I could design for them
The hardest part of this project wasn't the design, it was getting up to speed on the domain quickly enough to make good decisions.
Rate vs. APR. Points. DTI. Lock requests. Refinance scenarios with current balance and current rate as anchors. Each of these terms meant something specific to a borrower, and getting any of them wrong in the interface —even a label — could create real confusion at a genuinely critical moment.
I spent time early on reading through the product, asking questions, and making sure I understood not just what the fields were, but what a borrower would actually be thinking when they looked at them.
Design
The Fix Was Structural Before It Was Visual
This project highlighted how all different teams worked with each other. While expense tracking focuses on visibility, financial operations depend on coordination between people, teams, and processes.
The most impactful improvements came from making responsibilities, approval states, and next steps visible throughout the workflow. By reducing ambiguity and creating clearer pathways through the system, the experience became easier to navigate while supporting significantly more complex organizational needs.
This feels much closer to the style and depth of your Polaris case study while still being noticeably shorter.
Hierarchy Did the Heavy Lifting Inside Each Card
Within each scenario, the question was: what does a borrower need to see first?
The answer was through progressive overload and information hierarchy. Important artifacts like rate, APR would lead. Others had a reduced visual weight on the display. Secondary details like points, DTI, and upfront cost are present but visually subordinate, there when needed without competing for attention upfront. These numbers are essential to view at once, but require an understanding of their importance. My experience at Outamation helped me have that knowledge long in advance.
The Comparison Mode Let Borrowers Go Deeper.
We decided we wanted to give borrowers who wanted to go beyond scanning the option to sit with two specific scenarios the ability to deeply compare them.
Takeaways
Clarity Is a Form of Respect
A mortgage is one of the largest financial decisions most people make. The pricing quotes page is the moment a borrower decides whether they understand their options well enough to commit to one.
The existing design wasn't broken — it had all the right information. What it lacked was structure that made comparison feel possible rather than exhausting. That's what the redesign was really about: not adding anything new, but organizing what was already there so borrowers could actually use it.
If I had more time:
I'd push the comparison experience further — letting borrowers highlight specific fields they care most about, so the side-by-side view adapts to their priorities rather than showing everything equally.
Done more research to learn about real estate, and interview agents within the company.
