Student Financial Planner

Understanding Student Loan Impact

Student debt is an enormous societal problem, and most solutions focus on debt after it is incurred and remain primarily ineffective.

I designed a student loan financial wellness platform for high school students and their parents that provides a perspective of the financial implications of the many financial, career, and lifestyle decisions they make around higher education.

The application helps students and parents make more informed decisions related to college choices to ultimately reduce student loan debt.

My Role

Conduct Design Sprint workshop
Sketching & wireframing
Low & high fidelity prototyping
User interviews & testing
Visual design
Agile sprint delivery

Product strategy and ideation

I co-facilitated a design sprint workshop that brought subject matter experts together. I led the team in creating personas, building a customer journey map, sketching, and voting on concepts.

Prototyping and refinement

Coming out of the workshop, I built rapid prototypes in Balsamiq and Invision to circulate and get feedback on the design concepts with stakeholders and target users.

It was really productive to take this approach as some of the winning concepts in the workshop did not turn out to be great approaches for the target audience. I took the learnings and quickly reworked the prototype to be more robust and streamlined. To help accomplish this, I refined the scope of the application and mapped out the user flow and information architecture.

Testing

Once we had a concrete baseline for the application, I led our team to conduct rigorous user interviews and user tests with target users.

I synthesized the results and developed a backlog of prioritization for taking the prototype to MVP.

I then worked with our engineering and product team to deliver the MVP in an agile sprint format. I helped set up JIRA, created our backlog and user stories, and worked through the entire lifecycle of development, providing design support where needed.

Solution

I designed the entire application feature set for the initial MVP version and post-launch feature updates.

The app provides high school students with the ability to:

Compare the cost of colleges with and without financial aid
Calculate student loans at different interest rates and measure the monthly payment based on colleges
Compare starting salaries for multiple careers in different cities
Create a budget planner
Calculate long-term return on investment for college, career, and city choices