RumahFirst

The Real Problem

Buying your first home in Malaysia means meeting a wall of vocabulary nobody warned you about. Margin of finance. MRTA. Stamp duty. RumahFirst's application flow served all of it up with zero explanation — as if every first-time buyer arrived with a banker in the family.

The numbers showed where that confidence ran out: 70% of applicants dropped off at the document upload step. Not because uploading a file is hard — because by that point nobody was sure they were doing any of it correctly, and walking away felt safer than getting a home loan wrong.

Finding the Fix

With two engineers and no research budget, discovery had to be scrappy. I guerrilla-tested at kopitiams — a laptop, a prototype, and whoever at the next table was willing to talk about house-hunting. Every stumble pointed at the same two gaps: unexplained jargon, and no sense of where you stood in the process.

So the redesign focused on exactly three things: a plain-language glossary built inline — tap any term, get a straight answer without leaving the page; a document checklist that tracks your progress as each item goes in; and a "can I afford this" calculator with honest defaults instead of optimistic ones.

What Actually Happened

The glossary took the most rounds. My first explanations were just shorter versions of the bank's — accurate and useless. Back to the kopitiam, rewrite, retest, until someone could read a definition once and explain the term back in their own words. That became the bar for every entry.

The checklist earned its keep fastest. Once people could see documents ticking off one by one, the upload step stopped feeling like a leap of faith and started feeling like the home stretch.

What Changed

Completion at the document upload step doubled. Support chats per application halved — the questions the team used to answer by hand were now answered inside the flow, at the exact moment they came up.

What I Had to Work With

Two engineers, twelve weeks, and no research budget. The kopitiam sessions weren't a quirky method choice — they were the only research we could afford. They turned out to be the right kind anyway: real people, real skepticism, no lab politeness.

What I'd Do Differently

Start the glossary on day one instead of treating it as polish for later — it turned out to be the load-bearing wall of the whole redesign. And take the prototype to the kopitiam earlier; every session was cheap, and every one of them changed something.

What I Learned

Jargon is a design decision. Every unexplained term quietly hands the bank's complexity to the person least equipped to carry it. Clarity is a feature — not copywriting polish — and on this project it moved the numbers more than any visual redesign could have.

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