A home for first-time buyers
Designing a personalised first-time buyer experience inside the Lloyd’s mobile app.
The brief
Buying a first home in the UK is harder than ever, with deposits averaging £62k, house prices up by 70% in a decade, and the average first-time buyer is now 34. Around 5 million active Lloyds app customers are currently saving to buy their first home.
Our brief was to design a dedicated first-time buyer space within the app which would surface relevant products, tools, and educational content. The goal was to help people buy their first home sooner by meeting them where they were, building trust through relevance, and making something genuinely complex feel more manageable.
My role
As the squad lead and senior content designer, I owned the end-to-end content strategy, the experience design, and cross-functional coordination. I worked closely with my UX designer throughout, but took the lead on shaping the experience's structure, narrative thread, content and language, and its evolution with users over time.
Discovery and direction
Before coming onto this project, it had been in development for 6 months with no progress. Because of this, it was key to hit the ground running, and so we led a series of concept workshops bringing together product, design, engineering, and propositions teams to establish what this space needed to fix, how it should behave, and what to prioritise. Running alongside this, the UX designer and I reviewed comparable products to understand how first-time buyer journeys were structured elsewhere and where they tended to fall down.
Two concepts emerged from this ideation: a topic-based experience and a timeline-based experience.
To pressure-test both, we ran surveys, unmoderated interaction tests and a moderated comprehension test. The findings from these shaped everything that came after.
The key findings were:
Many users still needed human contact at key moments.
Many weren't clear on what stage of the journey they were at.
People’s learning styles varied widely, with some wanting to be led through the experience and others wanting to pick and choose what they want to interact with.
Some users felt very overwhelmed by what we thought were quite simple concepts, like setting up a goal.
Having savings didn't equate to feeling ready, and emotional readiness couldn't be measured by finances alone.
After this research, the timeline approach was confirmed as the right direction.
Designing the content experience
Getting the experience right
I built the experience around a simple principle: the right information, at the right time. The structure was loosely linear, aiming to guide rather than be prescriptive. Research showed that a rigid, step-by-step progression felt overwhelming, so I deliberately avoided it and removed references to tasks, to-do lists and other terms.
Since it typically takes around eight years to save a first-home deposit, users had vastly different needs depending on their stage. I designed a single-question triage to establish where someone was in their journey and surface the most relevant content for them.
The question was: Where are you in your home buying journey? The three options were written in emotional, self-identifying terms rather than financial ones. This was a deliberate choice as research had shown that people locate themselves in this journey by how they feel, not just by what they have. It was the key mechanism that made personalisation possible without creating drop-off.
Crucially, nothing was lost as a customer moved through their journey. The experience evolved with them rather than being reset, so content remained accessible whether someone was just starting to save or on the verge of making an offer.
When familiar design patterns don't fit
The new experience was built on top of Plans, an existing Lloyds product using task-based language: "to-do list", "complete", "next step". The initial brief called for a similar structure, with a growing list of actions tied to progress tracking.
Research told us this wasn't working. The big difference between the My First Home experience and Plans was the scale of information, and users said the volume of tasks felt overwhelming, and several described the experience as ‘like being back at school’.
I made the call to move away from task-based language. Categories were renamed using broader, goal-oriented framing and the experience was redesigned to allow non-linear exploration. I wanted users to feel guided rather than instructed, and trusted rather than tested.
This required internal alignment work. Plans was a familiar, proven pattern within the business and departing from it needed to be clearly reasoned. I used the research to build the case, working with the UX designer to ensure the revised approach held together across both content and interaction design.
Rethinking educational content
A significant part of the experience was built around educational content that already existed on the Lloyds website. The challenge was that it had been written for the web, so it was long-form, SEO-heavy, and structured in a way that didn't translate to mobile.
The propositions team originally wanted all 24 pieces brought into the app. The customer journey manager and I pushed back and got this down to seven pieces initially. We based the decision on which articles were most popular on the website and genuinely evergreen.
Bringing the content into the app was important as asking someone to leave the experience at the moment they needed information most was a friction point we could remove, and keeping them in the app meant we could control the experience end to end.
The content needed significant reworking. I restructured each guide into a series of short, focused pages designed to work like a story that users could slide through. This structure mirrored how people actually read on mobile and reduced the cognitive load of navigating long, dense pages.
I lowered the reading age to 11, removed all marketing links and campaign content, and added images to give the content visual breathing room. The goal was for it to feel like useful, trustworthy information and not a product page.
Outcomes
Released November 2025. In the first month:
7,700+ users with a 37% return rate, exceptionally high for Lloyds
18% of handoffs went to commercial actions: opening new savings accounts and investment accounts, or mortgage applications
78% of users completed the triage, which was well above our internal threshold, and a strong early signal for engagement
Learnings
Emotional design is a content problem
The most valuable research finding wasn't about navigation or hierarchy for me; it was that financial and emotional readiness are different. Users with significant savings still didn't feel ready. This reframed the whole project for us and was the principle that shaped everything from the triage question to how we talked about progress.
Familiar patterns need to earn their place
Borrowing from the Plans model was a sensible starting point, but applying it too directly meant importing assumptions that didn't fit this context. The key lesson was always starting from the user's mental model, not our product team's.
When research showed the structure was creating anxiety rather than clarity, I had to be willing to depart from something the business knew and trusted.
Research gives you permission to be bold
Having specific, well-evidenced user research to point to allowed us to make bolder choices and bring stakeholders along with us because they had grounding in real evidence. On projects where content direction is genuinely contentious, the quality of the research is what creates room to move.
Content and UX are better when they co-design from the start
This was a project where content and UX shaped the experience together from the beginning, rather than content arriving late to fill in wireframes. Structure, naming, and user flow were designed in parallel, which meant fewer late-stage rewrites and a more coherent experience overall. It's a way of working I'd advocate for on any product.