Making a mortgage disclosure actually readable

Why this project existed

Mortgage disclosures are the most important document a home buyer sees during origination, and they are also the document buyers are least likely to read. Regulators require the disclosure. Banks produce it to a minimum standard. Applicants click through it to get to the sign button. The disclosure exists, legally, but it does not exist functionally in the buyer’s head.

Horizon Bank had been flagged in two separate CFPB complaints where buyers claimed they had not understood a specific term at origination. The bank’s position in both cases was correct under the law, the disclosure had contained the term, and the buyer had signed. The complaints were dismissed. The bank’s leadership decided, independently of the complaints, that dismissal was not the goal. The goal was that buyers actually understood what they were signing.

The constraint that shaped everything

Unlike a typical content redesign, this one had a hard floor. Certain sentences in the disclosure are mandated verbatim by regulation. We could not paraphrase them. We could not shorten them. We could not reorder them in a way that changed their meaning. The seven-week legal discovery phase was about identifying exactly which sentences had that constraint and which did not.

The output of that phase was a master document with every sentence color-coded. Red sentences were verbatim-mandated. Yellow sentences were content-mandated but wording-flexible. Green sentences were our content entirely. The redesign could only modify yellow and green. Red sentences had to appear, in order, exactly as written.

The three-layer disclosure

The final design uses three stacked layers within each section.

The summary layer, two to three sentences in our plain-language voice, explains what the section means in the buyer’s terms. These are green sentences entirely.

The legal layer contains the full regulator-required text, including the verbatim-mandated red sentences. We set this at the same body size as the summary rather than the tiny type the original used. Buyers can read it without strain.

The glossary layer is anchored, every term that we know tests poorly in comprehension is linked to a definition that opens in a sidebar on desktop or a bottom sheet on mobile. The glossary entry stays open as the buyer scrolls, so they can keep the definition visible while reading the sentence that used the term.

What we cut

An early design had a “plain-language only” mode that hid the legal text. We cut it during the legal review, the legal text has to be present, not optional, per regulation. We kept the summary layer but made the legal text always visible directly beneath it.

An early design also had a comprehension check at the end of each section, a one-question multiple choice before the buyer could proceed. Compliance was enthusiastic about this. Applicants, in testing, found it condescending and were visibly annoyed. We cut it and measured comprehension through a voluntary post-sign survey instead.

Outcomes

Comprehension-test pass rate moved from 22% to 71% across three hundred applicants in controlled testing. Median time on disclosure grew by fourteen minutes, which reads like a bad metric but is precisely the result we wanted, applicants were now actually reading the document.

Post-close complaints citing the disclosure dropped 58% year over year. Three quarterly compliance audits since launch have returned zero findings. Two other banks have asked Horizon to license the framework. Horizon declined, offered to publish the approach as a public case study, and is doing so this year.

What I think about

Content design and product design separate for historical reasons that do not serve the work. On this project there was no line between the two. The words on the page were the product. Every interaction was in service of reading. Calling it “content” or “UX” did not matter.